787th played so far

Genre: Shoot ‘Em Up/Strategy
Platform: PC/Playstation 3/Xbox 360
Year of Release: 2009
Developer: Codemasters
Publisher: Codemasters

I’m starting to feel more apathetic towards these military shooters. They’re big and popular, but while some Call of Duty games can sort of manage to draw me in, the first iteration of Operation Flashpoint didn’t work for me and my recent experiences with Battlefield haven’t been great either. I want to say I’ve got a good feeling about the sequel, but I don’t expect to make it deep in.

Our Thoughts

I don’t think Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising improved on the first game… I still didn’t see any actual enemies, was killed out of nowhere and felt I mostly relied on the AI to deal with all of that. I guess it’s strategy, but not in a way that made me feel I was directing anything, more just spamming the attack button. I’m not sure if it’s the graphics or the game’s intentions, but since we’re not set up for sniping in that first mission, it still failed as much as it did before.

That lack of clarity continued as I progressed in the first mission. As part of the game’s semi-tutorial, you’re told to call in an air strike on a specific place. It took me several goes to trigger that… and then didn’t have it change anything. I couldn’t call a second strike, but while I thought I hit it, it wasn’t enough. Since I didn’t seem to get the option again, it felt like the mission just broke (I had no chance of defeating them), and so that was it, really.

With a game setting that’s generic army fare against bad guys, so that, too, didn’t give me a reason to keep going in the game.

Final Thoughts

While I’m sure the game works when you get into it, it just came across as broken to me, inaccessible and very much paint by numbers. It wasn’t worth the investment and it feels like other games do it better.