Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising is the long-awaited sequel to the 2001 PC game Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis and the 2005 Xbox port Operation Flashpoint: Elite. It’s only a sequel in the sense that the game is a tactical shooter designed to realistically represent warfare, with emphasis on freedom of choice and quick decision making under fire.

The game is based on the island of Skira, off the north coast of Japan, where you lead a four man USMC squad sent in to stop an international conflict turning into a war. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has invaded Skira to take the large oil reserves from its Russian owners. The island is a vast area, 220 square kilometres, which allows you complete freedom when choosing how to complete missions. This makes for a huge play area but the graphics - despite using the same Codemaster’s Ego game engine that was used for the vivid GRID and DiRT racing games - are mostly bland and washed-out green and grey, which gives the game a moody look but also makes it extremely difficult to pick enemies out of any foliage or undergrowth, and near impossible if you’re not playing in HD.

The load-outs of your squad vary from mission to mission, from assault mode, to stealth with heat vision and suppressed weaponry. More weapons can be picked up from downed enemies as you can access their inventory and take any ammunition, equipment and weapons they were carrying. You are also equipped with night vision for when it gets dark, due to the game having a day/night cycle, which is only noticeable when the missions are very long.

To keep with the realism, each level requires you to move long distances, mainly on foot. To begin with this is fine as it adds to the realism and on some of the earlier levels you can drive a commandeered Chinese jeep to cover the distance but it starts to become a pain later on. If you should find one, it’s easy enough to enter a vehicle (just press ‘X’) near the door, but the way you select which seat you want to take (you might want to be driver, pilot, commander, passenger or gunner for instance) borders on the ridiculous, with you having to point at an icon (that seems to move around and even disappear sometimes) in order to make the desired selection. It’s much easier to just get in the first seat you can and then press 'L1' which brings up a menu from which you can select any position in the vehicle, but it's just one more clunky menu that could have been a lot more slickly implemented, or even done away with altogether. As you progress vehicles become even sparser and you find yourself running for long periods of time and covering huge distances on foot. We looked high and low, but where were all the tanks and gunships to play with that are suggested in the TV ads? You could fly/drive allsorts in the original PC and Xbox games, and although I stole an AAV from our guys on one occasion, I couldn't drive any of the M1 Abrams tanks (that appear in just one mission), never got to fly a Cobra gunship, or pilot a boat and was only (seemingly grudgingly) given a Humvee and a Black Hawk for short trips throughout the entire campaign! If you don’t like using vehicles in your war games, and like yomping for miles just to get shot and have to yomp it all over again, this is the game for you.

Your squad of 3 can be commanded using the map for long distances and also using a ring system. This ring is split up into sections; offensive, defensive and movement. This helps you to command your squad with relative ease. At points in the game the AI of your squad can be brilliant, with them laying down covering fire just where you wanted allowing you to complete the objective, but these instances are few and far between. Most of the time the AI is extremely stupid and makes it difficult to complete missions without loss. If you tell your squad to hide behind something, quite often one of them will stand behind it with their head stuck out and get sniped by the enemies. Order them to hold a building or area and they’ll often wander off on their own and get shot. This can make it extremely frustrating to complete levels, so much so that you may end up wanting to throw your controller at the TV hoping to knock some sense into the AI (but you won’t).

The game’s basic difficulty setting is quite hard, and the levels of difficulty don’t vary much in terms of the AI, but the main differences are what’s displayed on the screen. On the easiest mode you have a full HUD and ammo counter, with the HUD showing red dots in the direction of any enemies that have been sighted. On the hardcore difficulty all of this is gone, and the only thing telling you where enemies are is the occasional shout from your squad mates and your own visual cues from the enemies’ tracer fire.

The game also has two other multiplayer modes, Annihilation and Infiltration. Annihilation is basically team death match for (disappointingly) only 2 to 8 people. With four on each team and four squads available there are a variety of ways to arrange yourselves. All four could be in the same squad or each could have their own squad with 3 AI-controlled grunts. With the AI soldiers to bump up the numbers this game mode can create an impression of war, with different squads running around doing separate bits to achieve victory, but you have to ask why it can only support 8 players.

Infiltration involves one side defending a facility and the other side attacking it. Although it may sound good, it doesn’t always play out the way you want it to. As each player can be in a different squad there can be quite a few AI on your team, which are just as clever as the single player campaign squad mates. The maps are limited to a four kilometre squared area and quite often you can play a match without coming into contact with any of the enemy, you just see them on the HUD display at the top.