Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising Review

The perfect opportunity to put 'Ride of the Valkyries' on the sound system.

Whichever way you slice it, Operation Flashpoint is a tough game, though its predecessor and genre stablemate ArmA II offers more of a challenge. The game keeps up its punishing degree of realism throughout, with only a few concessions to easily frustrated casual players. Checkpoints resurrect fallen comrades, which makes no sense whatsoever, but we’re still glad of the break. Remember – each and every one of these niceties can be switched off if you insist on playing the game in all its unabated, hyper-real glory. Just don’t come crying to us when you’re riddled with bullets and left for dead on a lonely hilltop.

In the event that you do start losing blood, a red gauge appears in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen indicating how much of the eight pints of claret you’ve got left coursing through your ruptured arteries. Swiftly applying a tourniquet from your field medikit to the affected area is of paramount importance therefore, lest you end up a drained pallid corpse lying in the grass. You can also use your field dressing to patch up your comrades if you can get to them in time.

Learning to think and react like a real-life soldier gradually becomes second nature as you battle your way through each increasingly harsh and exacting trial thrown your way. Things start off gently enough, easing you in with a straightforward search and destroy mission, where you and your team are tasked with taking out a radar array and a SAM site before calling in a laser-guided air strike on an enemy-occupied beachfront village.

Rocking up to an enemy encampment in a buggy is just asking for trouble. You're completely overexposed.

The basic FPS controls are tight and intuitive, expertly adapted for console controllers from the intricate PC system, with tiers of commands and extra functions such as fire rate adjustment, night vision or flashlight mapped to the right shoulder button and D-pad respectively. Hardened PC gamers might bemoan this sequel’s increased focus on accessibility as an effort to appeal to the short attention spans of the couch potato gamer, but the resulting game is one that is massively playable on whatever platform you choose to enjoy it.

Operation Flashpoint might be in its element on mouse and keys, but it’s heartening to see that the PS3 and Xbox 360 hasn’t been palmed off with a watered-down version of the game. Visually, the game looks functionally pretty across the board, with no major glitches – impressive given the island’s scale and the 30-kilometre draw distance.

Codies’ proprietary EGO Engine, which also powers the remarkably good-looking DiRT series, produces equally spectacular results in Dragon Rising, although the ground vehicles feel a little too floaty at times, providing little feedback as you ride roughshod over Skira’s craggy hills and valleys. Boats and helicopters fare a lot better, their novelty value alone proving immense fun.

In the easier modes, your HUD highlights enemies and indicates the status of your squad.

A fantastic four-player online co-op campaign mode and enjoyable PvP matches compliment the compelling solo campaign, rounding out a deeply impressive presentation. Codemasters’ in-house team have done themselves proud, hitting the perfect middle ground between welcoming immediacy and exacting complexity.

Staunchly challenging, yet incredibly rewarding, Dragon Rising might deter some due to its unremitting devotion to realism, while upsetting others with its co$nsole-friendly tweaks. Given the significant scaling back of the first game‘s callousness, the sequel still features more than enough authenticity and detail to communicate what being in battle might actually be like. It’s about as close as we’d ever like to get to real war anyway. Hugely immersive and absorbing, Operation Flashpoint is brutally taxing but seldom unfair.