Operation Flashpoint - Dragon Rising

[darker]

Operation Flashpoint : Dragon Rising - Codemasters - http://www.flashpointgame.com

Every oldschool PC gamer knows Flashpoint. If you don't, you just ain't oldschool enough, or you happened to live under a rock during the year 2001. I vaguely remember the warm summer days before my own enlistment to FDF. We had arranged a small LAN event among friends to celebrate (or to mourn, actually) our forced departure to learn how to defend our dear country. And man did we play OFP almost 3 days non-stop. Now, almost a decade later, and one stormy break-up between the BIS (original flashpoint creators) and Codemasters (the publisher), we have the bastard child of the old OFP, with half the name and half the wit of it's father, pitted against the vision of the original BIS team, a game that goes by the name ARMA II.


If it's about oil, you know who to call

The story behind the conflict is the usual one. I guess you could even call it a realistic scenario if you will, given the recent military exploits of U.S of A. There's some oil to be collected on a relatively small island of Skira, so long story compressed into a non-tl;dr version, both the americans and the chinese want in on the resource.

Skira itself, being an island once again, and relatively uninhabited gives me a strong dejavu from the old OFP campaing map. It's really a shame though that the map lacks all major settlements. I guess the highest building on the map is a goddamn radio tower on a hill, second place goes to grandma Chi's old barn. Even OFP (at least with the resistance expansion) had some decent towns with multistory buildings from some urban warfare fun. Apparently CM's engine isn't that good with displaying something else than grass, hills and four spec ops soldiers prone between all this wildlife. Or wild no-life, since there ain't any animals on the damn island either. Or civilians. And where is my assault Zetor, the most awesome transportation device built by man!

Gameplay isn't that bad, you get a fucking lame excuse of a campaing with 11 relatively short missions, but at least most of the time you spend on it will be that of a quality. Each friend you bring along will also exponentially increase the satisfaction, and save your sanity as you can mostly avoid the horrid friendly AI.

The enemy AI isn't worth celebrating either. At least they shoot pretty decently on hardcore level. On a bad day, they just stand upright and wait to be killed. The AI is especially sad on long ranges, since they usually just go prone and start shitting themselves when you open fire on 'em with a barret from a hilltop 800m away.

It's not all that bad in the end. We actually endured the bugs and the stupid design flaws, and managed to finish the campaing part with a 4 player co-op. I wasn't wetting myself in excitement, but I guess I was entertained, if nothing else. The game also has it's moments, when you're pushing forward in a hail of bullets, seeing your squad fall next to you, and hearing the lamentations of the medics that are tasked with the ungrateful task of running next to them once more to awaken them with their allmighty morphine syringe.


From Rheinmetall, with love

Let's get the technical aspects out of the way here, shall we. The engine resembles the old flashpoints one in many ways. Sadly, the scope has been downtuned from full squad / half of a platoon scale to a small spec ops team, at least in single player and cooperative modes. The actual problem here arises from the fact that we already have plethora of small squad scale shooters with decent co-op. The main problem most likely lies in the engine itself, which for example resticts the number of simultaneous units on the mission script to 64 in retail version. There are ways to work around the restrictions and shortcomings of the engine itself, as few clever modders soon demonstrated after the release with triggered spawning system, which enables the mission to spawn entities only when the players enter the designated areas.

The game looks great graphics wise. Grass, good visibility, crisp textures, we have 'em all in this one. And what's even more important, it actually runs on computers that ain't exactly in par with IBM super computers, unlike ARMA II. Things are almost equally well in the sound department, except that the guns could still pack a bit more of bit good ol' "OOOOMPHHHFFF". The special mention goes to the menu music, and the chinese guy that sounds like he's having a REALLY bad hangover, maybe even a decent Shout vomiting hangover.



Multiplayer: band of suffering brothers, with wallhaxors and lag

I guess it would be pretty easy to understang from the earlier parts that I concider the single player / cooperative (campaing) content to be a failure. That's actually quite far from the truth. God strike me down and devil paint my balls red and smash 'em with a hammer, I am a man enough to admit I actually like OFPDR and it's co-op play! I do realize it would be sane to hate this abomination, which spits in the eye of it's predecessor and turns it into stupified console mockup of a war simulation, but I just can't bear myself to do it. The multiplayer, well ... that's a whole different story.

The first commandment they broke was not to include any form of copy protection. Maybe the developers (or the marketing departments) count 1+1, see the fact that the PC version is only going to be illegally downloaded 2,000,000 times, and decide it's just not worth it to go through extra trouble. As a byproduct we get a game that was propably hacked 2 weeks before the actual release, that you can freely play online with a downloaded version. Actually, I'm just shooting with blanks here, as I didn't really even get a chance to spot any blatant cheaters. Actually, spotting any other players was pretty damn hard, since CM's master servers were down for the whole 2 days after the release, making it impossible to log into the multiplayer server, adding friends to your personal list, or getting into an actual multiplayer game.

Second commandment is that of content, and CM also fucks this up in a classical manner. Too few maps, boring gametypes, unstable and laggy gameplay ... I'll be honest, I think we played a total of 3 rounds or so before giving up on multiplayer. It just was not fun, at all. Everyone from CG was pretty damn pissed after the first 2 days of broken master server hammering, and I think none of us went back to actually test the MP after that. Rest assured, we weren't the only ones. Recent check on the server list returned 4 games in the whole wide world, so either the game browser is (still completely) broken, or the game has already died worldwide.

Conclusions

To sum it up : nice try Codemasters, close but no cigar. Great engine, which fails to deliver the content to keep the players happy. Failed multiplayer concept, next time use a copy protection, faggots.

The CM and the dev team have also already made it public, that OFP:DR won't be receiving any more patches after the latest 2nd PC patch went live. Given the amount of live servers visible and the general response from the whole OFP:DR community, I don't recommend buying this game anymore. It's officially dead now.

Metacritics on Operation Flashpoint : Dragon Rising

http://www.metacritic.com/games/platfor ... flashpoint

[LordBhorak]

And getting this done, too?

[darker]

Okay, here goes.

OFP2DR, the game that should have kicked ass, but at some point Codemasters managed to pull an epic fail with their dev team, which lead to a multiplatform game that ends up suckin on all platforms. The lack of copyprotection and plethora of hacks killed the multiplayer, along with laggy and buggy master servers during the launch. Server browser tells it all, 4 active games during a weekend prime time.

Campaing is decent, but too short and too easy. Coop is fun, but 4 player limit is way too strict. Editor is cool, but scripts aren't reliable, and end up bugging up, making units miss their paths or not to move at all. AI is clueless for most of the time, tank drivers are on crack and can't even navigate on a straight road.

Coop is clearly the best and most entertaining part of this game, too bad no-one bothers to play the damn game anymore.

To sum it up : nice try Codemasters, close but no cigar. Great engine, which fails to deliver the content to keep the players happy. Failed multiplayer concept, next time use a copy protection, faggots.

[Poksauttaja]

I'd buy a gaming magazine with reviews by darker : D

[LordBhorak]

I'd buy a gaming magazine with reviews by darker : D

Ditto. :D Short and accurate.

And Darker... let's try those Coop mods this weekend?

[darker]

I actually went back to the topic and wrote a decent, honest review about it. Give it a go, feel free to laugh, and guess what parts were written later on, you can see the annoyance building up in some parts. =D

Next up, ARMA II, a truthful review, after I give it a playtime of few weeks. =)