I walked into Blockbuster this week with the gleeful excitement of a young boy only to have my hopes crushed. On October 20th a game called Borderlands was released. If you have never heard of it check it out, the concept is quite cool and my interest was peaked. My Blockbuster location only orders four or five copies of new exciting games and will order twenty or twenty five copies of really bad games. When I arrived there on the 20th they were all out of Borderlands and had to settle on Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising (OF:DR).
OF:DR is a modern military first person shooter made by Codemasters. A great man once said "you can't judge a book by it's cover" and I usually try not to but Codemasters has never put out a game that I've enjoyed. In my own journey to become a wise man I decided to give OF:DR its chance to blow my mind. Now listen Codemasters, it's not an easy task trying to release a modern military FPS in todays market. There are plenty of great titles out there like Battlefield 2 or Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare just to name two, who handle this genre easily and successfully.
As soon as the game booted up and the menu music started I was pleasantly surprised to hear a soft chorus of female voices in a slow song that sounded quite epic. The dark silhouetted menu screen was well put together and quick to navigate. It all reminded me of Black Hawk Down. I selected "New Campaign" and began my new adventure. I was quickly assaulted with the opening video which looked like it was all done in flash. This was cool the first time I saw it in the opening video for Call of Duty: World At War. Nice try OF:DR but I'm going to need a bit more effort out of you. The video explained the history of a small island called Skira, which is based on the real world island of Kiska. Basically China and Russia have been warring over this island because of, you guessed it, oil. Russia and America are allies against the Chinese forces and the American army comes to the rescue.
After being briefed quite loosely on what my squad and I are doing on the island I accepted my mission and began my purging of the Chinese occupancy force. The screen quickly faded from black to the first person perspective I expected and I began to press buttons familiarizing myself with the controls when what to my surprise did I find? No jump button!? I'm supposed to believe that my United States Navy Marine can't jump? I understand as a developer you need to find a way to keep things realistic (so no bunny-hopping) but if I can't jump over small rocks and bushes how am I to believe my marine can survive everyday life? Putting aside my feelings over the whole jump button fiasco I pressed the "map" button and was actually impressed. Codemasters actually copied the terrain of the entire island of Kiska and gave it to us a sandbox and subsequently gives us a great sense of immersion. Excited by this idea I felt that my mission could wait a few minutes and began to explore the island. This quickly became uninteresting as the actual island is quite big and takes a fair amount of time to travel.
After turning back from my wayward exploration I decided to continue my mission and see what else OF:DR had to offer. The first thing I noticed was that I had to walk/run a long ways to get to my current objective. This is acceptable only because they based the terrain on a real island. It's also really frustrating as the game has checkpoints at which it'll save your progress. If one were to die for any reason before one of these checkpoints then the game reloads you at the previous checkpoint, leaving all that walking to be done again. As I neared my objective my soldier verbally stated "Target....Rifleman.....300 meters North". I quickly dropped to one knee and looked through my scope to check out the situation. Nothing. I couldn't see anything. It was all just trees, grass, foliage, and sky. No worries I thought, if I can't see them then they probably can't see me. I took a few more steps when I was hit in the chest by a bullet. I dropped back down and looked through my sights again and could see my target ahead, I lined him up and pulled the trigger. Nothing. I shot again and again, all perfectly aimed shots. Nothing. During this time I kept taking fire and eventually died. If I can't see a soldier from 300 meters then he shouldn't be able to see me, and if he can then why can't I hit him if he can kill me from that distance?
I grew increasingly more frustrated with OF:DR as I continued playing it. Your fire team is a bunch of badly programmed AI. It takes at least 4 bullets to even slow down an enemy while it only takes 1 enemy bullet to put you down. The tactical order menu is slow and out of date. What happened to voice activated commands? SOCOM: U.S. Navy Seals did a great job and it was released in 2002. Once you opened a door it wasn't closable. There's too much that fell apart as I played OF:DR. Too many things were inexcusably bad. A good menu, potential for great immersion, and nice scenery isn't enough to make a good game. I felt as though OF:DR was trying to be a copy of some great military tactical FPS's but it falls short. So the next time you walk into a store thinking about playing a good FPS, skip right past any Codemasters game and pick a classic. Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising is not worth the time or effort of playing it.
Thank you for your time my friends.
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