User Review : Operation Flashpoint 2: Dragon Rising

It's real, it's gritty and it's incredibly fun...you wanna live forever?! (Cue 'Song 2')

I’ve been breaking a lot of rules, first with ‘Modern Warfare 2’, now with ‘Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising’ (OFDR). But man, did I want this one. Ever since I first laid eyes on those luscious pictures in a UK edition of ‘Official Playstation Magazine’, I got the same tingly feeling that I get when I see Gemma Atkinson on the cover of FHM.

So I started following it through online forums and sites and game magazines and the more I learnt about it, the more I liked it. Now that I’ve played it, I can say I love this game. It’s gritty and it’s different and, more importantly, it’s an effing good play. Whether you’ll like OFDR or not depends on if you’ll take to its realistic style. Personally, I’ve never played anything so fun and frustrating at the same time since Rainbow Six on the PC. So reset your learning curve, soldier, we’re going to war.

‘Dragon Rising’ is set on fictional Skira Island, a beautifully rendered 220km sq piece of rock with thick woods, sprawling open fields, rolling hills and a long fictional history of exchanging hands. When the economy tanks, China’s manufacturing industry goes with it. Internal conflict explodes, diplomacy gives everyone the finger and Skira becomes a battlefield as Chinese hardliners and Russia fight over its rich oil reserves and, somewhere in all that mess, the US gets involved.

You take on the role of two soldiers throughout the campaign; Sgt Hunter and Lt. Muholland, both who lead a squad of four guys. Hunter’s squad, Dagger One Bravo, is attached to the main force. Their missions usually take part during the day and are usually the more generic sort, like clearing the path for the main invasion force by destroying AT teams or AAA vehicles (you won’t believe how many times you have to do that). Muholland’s missions usually ask for a stealthier approach and involve destroying or capturing key objectives, like a fuel depot or a radio station.

OFDR is a squad-based strategy game where you command up to three marines, each with a specialty – machine gunner, engineer, medic etc – and you can choose to split them up or you can all stay together. Pressing R1 calls up a ‘Quick Command Radial’ with four options, each with another four sub-options, to help you figure out the best approach for each situation, from formations – stay together or spread out – to movement tactics – defend or assault – to calling in artillery strikes. There’s a fair amount to take in, but you’ll need it as you only have a few seconds to make a snap decision when something comes up. You can give orders out on the field or pressing ‘select’ pulls up a local map, where you can order your guys to move to positions that aren’t visible from where you are.

This squad-based game play complements Skira’s open-world because it leaves the strategy to you. You can assault your objective from whichever side you want; north, south, east, north east, whatever. It’s a thinking man’s game. Want to get in as close as you can before initiating contact? Maybe those clumps of trees on the East will cover your approach. Maybe you want to take out as many as you can from afar before closing in to mop up the stragglers, call in an air strike first. It’s liberating to have that kind of control in a FPS; you’re not playing scripted fights where you’re supposed follow a set path. There’s a lot of freedom to move around; up the middle, left flank, right flank etc. Of course, ‘Codemasters’ haven’t abandoned you. Some will appreciate the optional rendezvous points that’ll take you through a suggested path that’s lined with cover. Follow these, or carve out your own path to your objectives, it’s your choice.

There’s no regenerating health here, you can’t jump behind a wall or barrel and wait for your wounds to magically heal. In OFDR, getting shot or bombed means one of three things will happen; if you can still move, you’ll need to fix up your wound before you bleed out. A critical hit will incapacitate you, and only a medic can help you, and, of course, kill-shots make you dead and wins you a trip back to the check point (which are pretty far apart if you ask me). What’s more, your wounds can affect your ability on the field; say if your leg is hurt, it might slow down your movements and you won’t be able to sprint.

Your guys are vulnerable too, they can die – and on the harder difficulties, they don’t re-spawn at the next check point – if they’re incapacitated and calling out for help, you need to help them before they bleed out. ‘Codemasters’ have made this an important aspect of the game; you need your men, so you need to take care of them, that includes getting them back on their feet and keeping them under cover. It forces you to change the way you play this game. Lone wolf doesn’t work here, try it and you’ll be surrounded and dead before you can rehearse your speech to Saint Peter.

There’s an impressive array of weapons from both sides to play with, from assault rifles, light machine guns to anti-tank weapons and rocket launchers. But features have been added onto them; like the option to switch between one-shot or semi-automatic for assault rifles, and instead of simply shoving a new grenade into the RPG or Javelin to reload it, it shows you getting to the ground, and preparing the weapon for firing before you can take a shot. It’s time consuming and frustrating when you’re under fire, you’re in a panic and all you want to do is get the damn thing loaded so you can take down that effing tank. Your guys are doing their best to cover you, but a stray bullet can still take you down at any moment.

Because it’s open world, there are no on-rails vehicle sections. Usually, the only time you use vehicles is to get you to your next objective. But the cool thing is you can walk around the Hum-vee or Black Hawk and choose which seat you want to take; want to just sit back? Pick one of the passenger seats. Are you a control freak? Get behind the wheel. Choose to be the guy to blow the shit out of everything? Then the gunner place is for you.

So an amazing amount of detail has gone into the game. ‘Codemasters’ have skirted the conventional and have put in its place something more dynamic, open and, in a lot of ways, more solid. Adapting to the game play can get a little daunting. We’ve been spoilt by ‘Call of Duty’ and ‘Resistance’, and when a game like this comes along and just drags you, kicking and screaming, into unfamiliar territory, clenching your jaw and gripping your controller until your knuckles turn white is understandable.

There are one or two issues I have with the game. Firstly, it doesn’t help that I have to wade through menus and sub-menus, and giving orders, while bullets are zinging past my head left and right, It’s a lot to do in the heat of battle and with the way it’s set up, I just didn’t find it convenient and compatible. But then that’s more of a personal thing, I’m sure with a fast brain and quick fingers, OFDR can be mastered easily. But beyond suppress and flank, strategy isn’t my strong suit, and I just found myself falling back onto what I know best – taking cover and just shooting at the enemy until they retreated or were killed – instead of over running them with strategies like the game wants you to do.

The AI is a different story and it’s not a personal thing. It craps out sometimes, both for the enemy and your squad mates. Your guys can get lost following you; you order everyone to ‘Follow Me’, you go for quite a distance before you turn around and find only one of your guys is beside you, you check the map and find the rest of them had lost you a couple of hundred meters back and are standing around. I had a situation where I was incapacitated, I called out to a medic, and he arrived and kept wandering back and forth over me until I eventually bled out and died, it was like he couldn’t find me even though I was right in front of him. The enemy AI has its problems, too; sometimes they stand there like mannequins just getting shot at and they don’t try to find cover. I once came up on a guy and didn’t see him until it was too late, and he’s just crouched there, doing nothing. Sometimes, the physical body might be there, but nobody’s home. Maybe they’ll come out with a patch to fix it, sometime in the future, if they haven’t already.

But for the most part, the AI worked. They were adaptive, they knew to find cover wherever it was available, they shifted to find better firing positions, and they knew to stay low or move around to make themselves harder to hit. The standard PLA rifle men weren’t too tough to beat, but the tougher, and much smarter, spec-ops units made formidable foes.

OFDR is different. From the very first moment you start playing, you can see how much ‘Codemasters’ put in to make this game feel authentic and the depths its goes to immerse you into a battlefield. Throw out everything you know from the usual suspects, they won’t help here. This is a game military enthusiasts and the like would eat up. It’s real, it’s raw, it’s incredibly fun and I learnt that my chances of surviving a real war are about the same as getting a date with Megan Fox. What can beat a lesson like that?