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Review: Operation Flashpoint – Dragon Rising

Woo

Nearly every gamer I know has a list of games that they’re keeping track of. After initially finding a game that sparks intense interest, one can spend months scouring the internet for the most minute of details that may slip through the cracks and end up on some obscure forum. That was me when it came to Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising.

After more than a year of waiting, its finally here.

The plot is fairly basic, from the wiki “The game takes place on a small, fictional island located off the north coast of Japan called Skira and is set in the near future. The island is a contested territory between Russia and China and becomes the centre of an armed conflict when a large untapped oil and gas reserve is discovered there. The Russians who own the island ask America (their allies) to intervene as they are busy dealing with a large Chinese force on their own Russian border. The game begins as the player arrives as part of the United States Marine Corps which is tasked with capturing the island, on behalf of the Russians, from the Chinese military.”

The island of Skira is 277km²(107 sq mi) and offers a wide variety of terrain, everything from craggy hillsides to open valleys and dense forests are available to the player, the open world environment of the game allows players to go about achieving their objectives using any means and route that they want.

In real time, crossing the island takes 9 hours on foot, 4 hours in a jeep and 20 minutes in a helicopter.

The Island of Skira

Having played the original OFP, I had assumed that the game would play in relatively the same manner…

I was wrong.

The good kind of wrong.

But right now I’m going to run through the negatives before I get to the positives. The singleplayer campaign is all in all rather disappointing. The majority of your time is spent traveling from one checkpoint to another, endless hours of trudging are punctuated by moments of chaos intense violence. The tedium of walking however completely ruins the overall feel of the game.

My second problem with the game lies in its AI. Using a command menu, you give orders to 3 squad mates who accompany you on your missions. And while the commands are detailed and realistic for the most part they’re useless. Unless you’re trying to sneak past enemies, whats the point in telling your AI to cease fire? And while formations are incredibly important in real life, commanding your fireteam into wedge formation has absolutely no use. Suppressing fire and Assault are the only useful commands I’ve found at this point. In multiplayer I end up running off on my own, using my AI on the rare occasion when I want to lay down covering fire or reinforce a position.

Now that I’ve gotten the negatives out of the way we’ll move on to the one thing that make my heart sing.

Multiplayer.

Online multiplayer in OFP2 is truly a thing of beauty. It’s an all out firefight between 8 players and 24 AI characters. Players are given the option of choosing from a number of various classes, each with their own unique purpose. You can be anything from a medic to a combat engineer, a helicopter pilot to a sniper, and anything in between. Honestly there is nothing better than having two opposing teams having it out across a river while brave players attempt to cross the bridge in between.

The only problem with multiplayer is the problems connecting to matches, though these are just standard problems associated with a games release, I’m sure a patch will be out within the week to fix it.

Overall a solid 8/10 from me.

- Dr Strange Lulz

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