Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising doesn't have save points, it uses checkpoints. Whoa there, hold on a minute. Don't go slouching off, grumbling about consoles and whatnot. It's not that bad. These checkpoints actually work. They don't always work, but they do the job better than the solitary save game in the first game did allowed. This is one game you'll actually finish before your hair falls out and you start looking longingly at cardigans in shop windows. If you want to keep it real and are into masochism, you can always just the game on Hardcore mode and not have any saves at all.
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For those of you who are baffled by the words I've just written, let me elucidate. Dragon Rising is a game where you get to play as a US soldier in the liberation of the fictional island of Skira. The people you're booting out are the Chinese People's Liberation Army, who've decided that the oil reserves contained underneath Skira are worth killing for. They plonk their troops in, Russia gets angry, the US is called in, and Uncle Sam proceeds to kick some PLA ass.
Your first mission is essentially a tutorial, although it never once drags you by the pubes down certain routes. There's also no patronising "Press W to move forward, left-click to fire" either. It errs too much on the 'let the player get on with it' side of things, telling you the name of the command you need to issue, but not which key that corresponds to. A quick scan through the key commands list will sort you out, but it does interrupt the flow a little. This doesn't happen a lot, though, so it's more a minor little quirk than anything else. Nearly everything in the game is intuitive and easy to get to grips with, except perhaps the radial command menu.
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This will probably get the most attention from irate fanboys. The deal is that you press Q and a radial menu appears. You then press one of the WSAD keys to pick a subsection, and so on. It's clearly designed for an analogue stick and can be a bit clunky, especially when you're bogged down in combat and all you want to do is tell your guys to defend a position or engage an enemy. A small number of commands can be issued on the map, but generally, if you want to tell your guys what to do, you'll use the radials. It takes time to get used to where certain commands are and how to get to them quickly, but once you do getting your comrades to do what you want is easy. Usually.
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This is a game that relies heavily on AI, but sometimes it'll fall over. However, it's nowhere near as bug-ridden as its rival ArmA II was on release. There aren't amusing/frustrating moments like finding your CO's mangled corpse under his desk at the beginning of a mission for no reason. What'll happen instead is that maybe one of your guys won't duck down quick enough behind a wall and get his head blown off by a lucky shot.
Certainly, it's annoying, but unless you're playing on Hardcore mode, they'll get revived when you pass through the next checkpoint.
Unrealistic this might be, but it does mean your frustration levels won't boil over if your guys do something a bit dumb. It might offend some people's sensibilities, but it sure beats going back miles back to the last checkpoint.
Perhaps the best thing about Dragon Rising is how you feel challenged by a difficult game, yet never so frustrated that you throw the mouse down in anger and hurry for the uninstall button. Sometimes you'll get killed by a great shot from an enemy soldier, which'll force you to repeat a significant section of a mission. Yet instead of frustrating you, it makes you think of new ways of approaching that mission. If you're getting pinned down by tanks or vast numbers of soldiers, perhaps when you do it again you'll approach the situation from a different angle to see if that makes a difference.
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This is a game of exploration and options, where the solution isn't just "go this way or not at all". It's challenging and hardcore, but always accessible. You'll almost certainly make mistakes and be cursing either luck or ineptitude (either your own or your allies') but you'll also be learning all the time, thinking about new ways to achieve the goal, and because it's virtually all driven dynamically with very few scripted events, each time the outcome will be slightly different.
This is probably true of most open-world games, but I don't think I've ever felt it as strongly, as innately, as I did when playing Dragon Rising. This same freedom of expression continues into the night missions, not all of which involve special operation types and silenced weapons. Indeed, the first one you embark upon is particularly tricky due to the fact you really have to keep that trigger finger in check. One shot and the whole place lights up and, given that the area is swarming with PLA troops, not to mention the deadly threat of patrolling gunships, it is crucial to be sensible in your choices. Going in all guns blazing will not only make you fail your secondary objective (don't be seen) but will result in your quick demise.
You might be able to bandage your wounds if you take a non-lethal hit, but that's not easy to do in the middle of a field with bullets kicking up dirt around your prone body. Speaking of healing, you've also got a medic as part of your squad, someone who can help in patching up your AI squad mates or just giving you a shot from a magic syringe. This replenishes the blood you've lost and is another attempt to make the non-hardcore experience a little less unforgiving. Again, if you crave realism, stick it on the Hardcore mode.
Missions themselves are reasonably varied, both from the start of the game and in how they develop. There are the aforementioned stealth missions where you'll have to secretly blow up a fuel dump or some anti-aircraft guns, plus you've also got rescue, beach assault and capture-and-hold-location missions. They all involve shooting a load of PLA troops, of course, but often you'll be sufficiently intrigued by the objectives of the next mission to bring in the whole "one more go" factor.
The military fetishists out there are going to be a little disappointed with the range of guns, weapons and so on that are available. While there are enough different types of gun or vehicle to keep a layman like myself satisfied, those who have an interest in military ordnance, ArmA II has the edge.
And you can't be a sheep or a cow in Dragon Rising either. The mission editor won't be as comprehensive as the ArmA II modding toolset Bohemia recently released (which is on this issue's DVD, in case you're interested), but there's certainly sufficient depth, especially when you start getting involved with the LUA scripting language to create elaborate scenarios. Whether you'll be able to create those amazing night battles so prevalent on YouTube, we'll just have to see.
Another direct point of comparison with ArmA II is performance and issues thereof. Because Dragon Rising is, to be blunt, more of an game than Bohemia's effort, it also runs a hell of a lot better. Let's face it, awe-inspiring in terms of depth and complexity ArmA II might be, it sometimes forgets it's actually a piece of entertainment, not a military training simulator. Dragon Rising never once forgets that it's ultimately meant to be fun, but any issue of it being dumbed down can be dismissed by all but the most obsessive realism nuts. Indeed, it's actually difficult to see how this game will succeed on the consoles.
Concessions are made to the use of pads - radial menus, checkpoints that revive your comrades, and so on - but if you're willing to look past these things, it's a difficult game. This is a game that requires patience, a quality most console gamers, it's fair to say, don't have in abundance. This isn't just your PC snob talking here: Dragon Rising never really feels like it has been co-developed for any armchair gamer - whether on the PC or a console - unlike so many big-name games released nowadays. It's a great relief to be able to write those words as so often we're left pandering to the perhaps-unfair belief that console gamers can't handle anything remotely complex, having to suffer the lukewarm button-mashing tedium-fests that are sloppily ported over.
Also Dragon Rising doesn't crash (at least, it didn't for us). Even running on maximum graphics setting - one gripe would be the lack of advanced graphics settings to tweak - we never ran into any frame rate or performance issues. The graphics are good without being anything spectacular, so it should run well on the majority of reasonably specced machines.
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The original Operation Flashpoint had a reasonable multiplayer element. While it wasn't great, it was fun for a while. It was also bollockingly hard. Dragon Rising's take on this should be better. As we're playing the game before the game goes out on sale, nobody else has a copy of it, so trying out the multiplayer function is effectively out of the question. We'll take another look at it in a future issue, once the game is out on general release and the multiplayer servers are populated.
What we can tell you about is the campaign co-op. This is superb fun. We all know playing with other people is great and Dragon Rising doesn't buck the excellence trend. It's pretty much exactly the same as the single-player experience, just with the added bonus of idiot human players mucking about.
While ArmA II had the potential to be superb Dragon Rising actually is, because it doesn't suffer from all the technical issues of the former game. Helicopters don't land on your head, they don't refuse to land if you to do something a little out of the ordinary, and you don't have to chase important NPCs over several kilometres because they got spooked by a bit of gunfire. (All of which we've seen happen when we've played ArmA II.)
The only problem you might have is an AI driver (of any vehicle) not having great pathfinding if you're in the commander's seat giving move orders. Usually they're fine, and this applies to the single-player as well. But sometimes trees can confuse drivers a bit, so they ignore the plants and plough through.
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Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising has achieved the singular feat of being a military simulator that's actually fun to play on more than just a "Look how much stuff is here!" way. Codemasters have remembered that the most important thing for a game to be is fun. At the end of the day, if your CO disintegrates for no reason and you can't proceed with the mission, it doesn't matter how accurate the spark plugs are on the vehicle you're driving, you'll get fed up and sack it off. What you want to do is be given an objective, go there and shoot some baddies, without any weirdness occurring.
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Dragon Rising makes this activity challenging but always pleasurable. It might be helping you out a bit too much at times with its life-giving checkpoints and magic syringes, but sometimes a bit of assistance isn't a bad thing. Some people will doubtless hate it, saying it's not a par on ArmA II, moaning about how it isn't realistic enough or that the PLA don't have accurate uniforms, but I advise you to ignore the naysayers and play the game. It's not perfect, there are little problems and niggles that can be found if you look for them, but none of them spoil the game or ruin the playing experience.
This might not be the proper successor to the original Operation Flashpoint, but as a game in its own right, it's a stormer.
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