I’ve had a soft spot for the Conflict series since they made us all feel like we were getting Iraqi sand in our boots way back in 2002. It should be said, they haven’t been the best looking or most glamourous of games, but always had something a bit special. It only took playing Denied Ops for a few minutes to make me realise what that special something was, a few days of play to truly miss it – fans of the series will already know what I’m talking about, but more about that later.
This is the fifth Conflict game, and veterans of previous Conflicts will be familiar with the team of Bradley, Foley, Connors & Jones (who were joined by a female sniper/medic called Carrie Sherman in Conflict: Global Storm). But they’ve been dumped and this Conflict sees you playing as either (or both) of 2 operatives from the clandestine S.A.D. (Special Activities Division, an unfortunate acronym) of the CIA; former Delta sniper Lincoln Graves and Reggie Lang, a former football pro who joined the FBI’s critical incident response group (yeah right – like that could happen!) after 9/11. Graves uses an SR-25 sniper rifle which can be upgraded with an under-mounted M26 shotgun, and Reggie Lang uses an M249 machine gun that gets tuned up with an under-mounted M230 grenade launcher. Each character earns a new weapon upgrade or grenade of some sort after each completed mission.
C:DO’s campaign takes place in areas across South America, Africa and Russia, and missions are introduced with cinematic cutscenes and a briefing screen. The game uses Pivotal’s new Puncture Technology™, which means you get highly destructible environments, allowing you to shoot through objects to create a hole to snipe through, or blast through some weaker wooden walls to take enemies out. There are several areas where you can blow through weaker walls and use the situation-specific ‘vault’ command (you press ‘A’) to clamber through. Unfortunately this doesn’t work as well as a simple ‘jump’ button would have done, so you’ll find yourself in some places where you should clearly be able to jump over a low wall or through a smashed window, but can’t because for some reason the ‘vault’ icon doesn’t appear. There are plenty of exploding barrels and fuel tanks dotted around, and with incendiary grenades becoming available to Lang this means that you can often explode and burn enemies out from behind cover, which is nice! The praiseworthy attention to physics also means that when you mess up an area it stays messed up, and no magic game fairies come along to tidy the wreckage/bodies etc if you pass back through an area.
The game tries at Hollywood-esque and explosive moments throughout, but to use a movie metaphor; if Call Of Duty 4 is Blackhawk Down, then C:DO is Team America – it feels like that much of a parody at times… however at it has a strangely PC plot that tries not to upset anyone too powerful or influential – it’s set during a fictional Venezuelan conflict in which a certain General Ramirez and his associates are plotting to take over their country. Ramirez sends his troops to seize the Petro Nivera Oil refinery then threatens to deploy nuclear weapons if the USA continue to "meddle in his country's affairs”. Well naturally, the CIA don’t butt out and all hell breaks loose as Lang and Graves go on a “covert” killing spree. For want of a better phrase; what a load of old bollocks!
But strangely I found I didn’t mind any of it. Maybe I’ve been bombarded with too many “realistic” shooters, but C:DO’s brand of cover, suppress, run & gun, and hot-swapping between characters kept me involved for several hours. Playing the game through on “Hard” I also found that I wanted to immediately return to failed missions to have another go, despite some gripes and more than a few issues; like the rubbish vehicle sections, a painfully slow-moving sniper scope, occasions when you can “see” a target but you can’t hit it and enemies that can take .762 sniper rounds in the chest and keep shooting back! Apart from a high resistance to my sniper rifle with anything but a head shot, the enemy AI is pretty good. It’s usually aggressive and believable, they run to get help, take cover or retreat when wounded and generally act in quite a convincing way. CD:O offers several opportunities to play stealthily, and as long as you’re crouched you create little sound and can sneak up on quite a few enemies, changing the way missions play out quite drastically. Areas often have two or more possible routes through them as well, meaning that you can form two-pronged attacks, or approach a tricky section from a different direction.
It won’t come as any shock to find that the two characters have totally opposite personalities. Graves likes it quiet and stealthy, whilst loudmouth Lang likes it loud and explosive. I have to say that neither of these two characters particularly appealed to me, and the ‘banter’ between the two is often ridiculous. Graves comes a cross as some sort of joyless Chuck Norris mercenary-type who’d says all the right things but would kill his own grandma for the right money, and Lang (hmm… remember Clubber Lang?) is an annoying cross between Mr T and Ving Rhames - and isn’t as cool as either. The other thing that’s changed from previous games is that now you play in first person, although the game does pull out to third person during some actions, like when you replenish ammo or climb a ladder (again, you have to press ‘A’). You have a basic one-button orders system and can hot-swap between the two guys at any time. If one gets knocked down the other can come give them an adrenalin shot and get them moving again.
C:DO’s multiplayer options are limited to Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch and Conquest. The 4-player split screen works well, with lots of destructible objects on the maps and a commendable frame rate. None of the 11 maps designated as ‘Small’, ‘Medium’ and ‘Big’, but in fact none are all that big by today’s standards, and there are no vehicles to play with, despite being areas from the campaign mode. Every time we tried it the adversarial online multiplayer mode was like a ghost town, but I'm presuming that not many fans of the series bought it to play deathmatches, and it was a lot easier to find a co-op game, but when you do find a game it plays quite well too. It seems a little weak and limited as you have to play as either Lang or Graves, and use their only their personal weapons. One feature I did like is that the leader in a deathmatch is always clearly marked, so everyone can hunt him down; it tends to keep scores tighter than games in which some clever dick finds a good camping spot or learns all the spawns. The co-op mode means you can have a friend help you if you get stuck on the solo campaign as well, which is always a welcome feature.
I have to say I enjoyed C:DO’s campaign, despite some gripes with the partner AI going AWOL or wandering out in the open unordered and getting dead when I was trying to sneakily snipe. Playing co-op with a friend either split screen or online is a much happier option, and the sheer amount of havoc you can create is always fun. I think it’s kind of a shame that Pivotal have gone down the first person route, and an even bigger shame that they didn’t squeeze a 4-player co-op out of the game engine - all 4 previous Conflicts had this – it’s what made them unique, but the game engine struggles occasionally with just 2, so you can see why. Still, whilst it might not be the best looking or original game out there, it certainly entertains, gives you plenty of ‘bang for your buck’ and most of the time it plays well, and that’s what counts, right?
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