Game: Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising
Publisher/Developer: Codemasters
Genre: Tactical FPS
Verdict: An often-brilliant shooter is occasionally let down by game design
Pros: Atmospheric; great sound design; nuanced and tense combat
Cons: Friendly AI is unhelpful; over-reliance on realism makes gameplay elements cumbersome
It’s 3am. I’m crouched in the bushes, night vision goggles on. An animal keens in the darkness. Paranoia strikes. Is it really an animal, or disguised enemy comms? I whip out my knife; the air hums with tension. Silence. I switch back to my assault rifle and decide to risk a hike to the evac chopper. Panicking, I maintain visual sweeps as I run. My heart thumps loudly. Only then did I realize – Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising is something special.
Not special like that girl you can’t talk to, or your cousin Frank who wears his pants on his head; it’s a good kind of special.
Operation Flashpoint is an impressive synthesis of gunplay and atmosphere, containing certain inalienable truths about war. You can die at any time; this stark vulnerability as a leader reduces combat to the sparest essence of “shoot them before they see you.” The immediacy of this design approach requires that you coordinate strategic strikes with a harsh, pitiless efficiency. The principle of Occam’s Razor will serve you well – maneuver your squad into position and launch an assault on your own terms. If you have the wrong weapon, you will probably die. If you can’t improvise, you will probably die. If you have no contingency plan, you will probably die. It’s exciting in a raw, rare way.
Naturally, authenticity is a fundamental component of such seamless immersion. It doesn’t take long to notice that the sound design and effects are absolutely sublime – every firearm has a distinct sound, and the background effects are eerily atmospheric. Bushes rustle, enemy troops call out in their native tongue, bullets thud into the ground next to you or ricochet around your vehicle. Even radio chatter is striking –acknowledgment of orders and confirmation of instructions follows strict military protocol. Combine this with the visual touches – dirt splattering the screen, tracer rounds zipping past to give away the positions of both sides, and slow, deliberate animations for equipment changes – and you have a game that makes combat feel unnervingly grim. While the landscapes are occasionally uneven in beauty and bland in texture, nothing manages to shake the permeating sensation that your incursion on Skira is plausible, terrifying, and exacting.
The skeletal structure of the game creates other problems, however. Checkpoints are sparse (they don’t even exist on hardcore difficulty); on its own, this feature actually works well, because it emphasizes yet again the need for a considered approach. That said, when paired with unorthodox game design, it serves to undermine – rather than build on – the desired effect. Information is like gold-dust: very rarely are you given an overview of the conflict, at least in-game. This underscores your unimportance as one more cog in the grinding war machine, a mere tool for use when diplomacy has failed. While temporarily engrossing, it doesn’t lend itself to making the game – or any game, for that matter – enjoyable.
Let me illustrate with an example: at the end of the third mission, I was given the task of defending a village from an enemy counter-attack. It was proving frustratingly impossible for two reasons. Firstly, the friendly AI is an alarmingly accurate projection of absent friends: both will drive me into trees, run away from my attempts at field dressings, refuse to obey my orders, and fail to shoot enemies on sight. This can serve to create amusing moments, but given the grave tone of the game, it sits uneasily with the central tenet of realism. It is also decidedly unrealistic to expect me to do the bulk of the work. Even after dispatching over fifty enemy troops, I was still overrun without any real help. Am I supposed to be leading a crack team of highly trained military men, where I am the only capable member? Oh please…
Secondly, I had been allowed to progress to the end of this mission without critical support. The mission brief was to secure a beachhead, which would allow for friendly APCs to move up. Earlier on, enemy spotters on a ridge had been raining down mortar fire on my friendlies. The APCs were destroyed before I could get to the spotters. I didn’t fail the mission, or even a secondary objective, and so on I pressed. Being a fairly unremarkable squad leader, my powers of prescience were still lying dormant – therefore, I had no idea that the APCs were key to securing the village later on. While the foolhardy out there have, I am assured, secured the village and resisted the counter-attack without the use of the APCs, it is laughably easy by comparison when using a vehicle-mounted grenade launcher. Unfortunately, this isn’t even an inconsistency: in the strictest possible terms, Codemasters have delivered what is expected: war is an unknown and constantly evolving arena. It does, though, bring one point under the microscope of critical consideration: a pedantic insistence on grit and realism detracts from a game, rather than adding to it.
It is a shame that Codemasters has allowed itself to be chained to a slavish and painstaking recreation of contemporary warfare, rather than allowing a more fluid interpretation, in the name of both fun and authenticity. Sometimes this overbearing philosophy simply isn’t borne out, either: issuing commands is as clunky as the inventory management system. This is especially puzzling given that – if I somehow found myself leading three other men into battle – all I’d have to do is shout loudly to give an order. The use of night vision goggle creates a “tunnel,” and the HUD removal in hardcore mode makes things deeply disorientating. While this again might bear some resemblance to its real-world counterpart (and, as an idea, have seemed like a good one during development), games cannot replicate how we might compensate: we would have full field of vision, depth perception, the familiarity of a squad with whom we’ve trained. It’s a frustrating mix not only for gameplay itself, but also in that Codemasters have so nearly created a tactical FPS unparalleled in its execution. As it is, though, the heady heights of brilliance seen here are frequent but inconsistent. Too often you will find yourself wishing certain features had been tweaked or improved to allow you to simply revel in the experience on offer.
One simple way to redress the issues of Dragon Rising is by playing a co-op campaign. Supporting up to four players, I played with three other friends, without evidence of any discernible lag or slow-down. Given the size of the island, this is technically quite impressive, although it does require that you all play with same amount of caution and co-ordination. Therefore, teamwork is just as essential – perhaps more so – than in single player mode.
So where does this leave Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising? The spartan nature of the game makes its recommendation rather problematic. The requirement for meticulous planning and – upon dying – the iterative improvement of your tactics will be too fussy for some: headless chicken brigade need not apply. Nevertheless, brief bursts of taut, compelling skirmishes are juxtaposed with just the right amount of navigation and reconnaissance. So much of what is provided oozes class and distinction, but relentlessly sombre design choices leave certain elements mired in the tedium of reality. The merits of Operation Flashpoint mirror its design: nothing less than absorbing, it remains an oddly organic mix of the cerebral and the adrenal. If you can overlook its intermittent – and occasionally plain broken – issues, then simply put, Dragon Rising demands your attention, both literally and figuratively.
