Talk about this game inside the industry and this Xbox conversion of the much loved, but 4 year-old PC game is often known as Operation Crashpoint, or Operation Framerate… And my first impressions of this game were not good: an iffy frame rate (just as it was on a ninja PC 4 years ago), unlovely textures (although they’ve been upgraded), and an annoying propensity to die from one shot within about 3 nanoseconds of starting some missions (depending on the difficulty setting).
First impressions do count, but they are, after all, just that: a first impression – implying that one may be able to formulate further impressions thereafter…. which is handy, really, cos I’ve formed a few more since I first played this epic war game. Also, with world events of late, this game is leant an even greater validity. Luckily (or unluckily, depending on your opinion), this game concentrates on fictional conflicts at the height of the Cold War – a time that could easily have led to the outbreak of World War III.
Bearing in mind that this game was originally released on PC before the amazingly successful GTA3 was born, even now it offers a fairly unique proposition to the connoisseur of the first or third person shooter/actioner genre – namely the ability to pilot/drive every (serviceable) vehicle one comes across during the missions.
The front end allows you to select individual missions (4 difficulty settings), design your own missions, or wade straight into a full-on war with the “Campaign Game” mode. If you select the latter you are treated to a scene-setting intro (using the in-game engine). It’s 1985, and you and your army buddies are sitting around, listening to a radio: Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev are having all sorts of problems with Perestroika (the “opening-up” of the USSR to the rest of the world)… KGB generals disagree with Gorbachev and this is causing all kinds of tension… blah blah. The upshot of this is that after you’ve been through your basic training, some naughty person has invaded one of the “Malden Islands” and you’ve gotta go in there and kick some ass. And sensibly, rather than playing as a single super-soldier as in most games, you play as several different characters (foot soldier, tank commander/driver/gunner, specs ops soldier, pilot etc.) during OFE's campaign mode.
Now – it’s round about here that Operation Flashpoint Elite and most other FPS’s part company. If this were any other game in the genre, you would be a “lone wolf” type character (Duke Nukem, B.J. Blazkowicz from Wolfenstein etc.) with an almost unlimited supply of armour and weapons, ready to go in, single-handed and all guns a-blazing, recklessly mowing down baddies left and right… not so with OFE – you start off as a grunt (a private in the army), you have limited armour and limited carrying capacity for weapons, and one accurate shot from the enemy will kill you… instantly.
After a briefing from a junior officer, and with mission notes to hand you arrive at varying “drop zones” via truck, helicopter or on foot. You will listen to your squad leader when he issues orders to follow him or get down on the ground, as failure to do so will usually result in either a) you getting shot/blown up by the enemy, or b) you getting lost… and then shot/blown up by the enemy – the feeling of being a part of an actual squad of soldiers is very persuasive, as is the feeling of being part of a larger conflict that you can genuinely help to affect the outcome of – even if sometimes missions seem to get “accomplished” without you doing a darned thing to help the cause. At certain points you get to order other soldiers around (even tanks or choppers) but the command interface for this isn’t great, and the training sections way too brief and vague. They leave you feeling like you’ve been dropped in at the deep end, which is I suspect is a lot like the real thing. Fortunately you can replay them as many times as you like, but mastering some commands is a game in itself, and thankfully the AI seems to achieve most things for itself (although watch out for the loony AI tank drivers). Watching a battle/skirmish unfold around you is quite a sight, and again, the feeling of being but a small cog in a large war machine is very convincing.
Movement in this game world is nowhere near as smooth or intuitive as, say GTA or Mercenaries. Some of the animation of your character is amusingly bad, and, as mentioned at the start of this review, the jerky frame rate really doesn’t help things here…. but – this if the Army and large scale conflict is your bag, somehow this game just feels right. In order to enjoy a game most people require it to have a decent frame rate (at least 30 frames per second) these days, but this game (like GTA3) almost completely transcends issues of fluidity due to the immersive nature of the “campaign” that you are a part of, and the feeling of exhilaration you will get from stumbling across an Apache AH-64 attack chopper and actually being able to get inside it and fly it. Unfortunately the aircraft are extremely tricky to fly, and even harder to use effectively as ground attack weapons due to some poorly calibrated sights and the fact that they really don't seem to like to fly slowly. But then getting into a large truck/jeep/tank and running over people like there’s no tomorrow will very nearly negate all maudlin feelings of a lack of precise control or blistering graphical prowess. I did say very nearly, but if you can’t abide games that stutter and jerk then I wouldn’t bother reading any further, OFE isn’t exactly a smoothie.
The sounds in this game are also worthy of note with a real feeling of “depth” to most of the environmental effects that surround you, like church bells ringing in the distance, dogs barking, crickets doing whatever it is crickets do, and birds singing – the music throughout the cut scenes is very cinematic, and lends a filmic quality to the proceedings. Most of the time weapon noises are also convincingly raucous when they should be. Unfortunately some other sound effects seem to have been done on the cheap, with many vehicles sounding identical (like a Hum Vee jeep and a M1 Abrams main battle tank) and the low point of the game, even allowing for the geographical placement of the developer, is the voice “acting”, some of which is fine, but certain excerpts of which would appear to have been done by pulling any passing people off the streets and asking them to read from a cue card, or maybe writing the dialogue up as they go along… And then a game that tries so hard to be a true army sim shoots itself in the foot again with things like this (as said by your character after blowing up a tank or something): “another bunch of bad guys bites the dust – am I good or am I good?”. Oh. Dear.
Operation Flashpoint can also be played online, where it, like every other game that can be played this way takes on a whole new feeling – essentially two games for the price of one. Multiplayer options are plentiful; My Missions (you can design your own missions), Deathmatch, CTF, Flag Fight, Co-op Mission, Team Mission, Sector Control or Hold Location. The number of players per mission/mode varies, and plenty of fun can be had with a group of like-minded individuals, but they have to be like-minded whether you’re being serious or not, as one mess-up can cause mission failure. The online menus are nicely presented but overly complex to navigate, and I spoke to a number of players who were just glad to join a game as they’d struggled to set up their own and then had trouble actually getting anyone to join it, and I myself kept backing out of Xbox Live altogether with one careless button press when trying to change options. But, be warned – some people who play this game online take it very seriously (a little too seriously, in all probability), and so, mucking around in vehicles a la GTA3 will probably not be smiled upon, as won’t running around, spraying everything that moves with your M16.
This is perhaps the “Microsoft Flight Simulator” of the First/Third Person Shooter genre, a brilliant concept even 4 years on, but I can’t help feeling that maybe developers Bohemia were just too ambitious for their own good in terms of scale and scope. Operation Flashpoint Elite is a potential classic, handicapped by a jerky frame rate and a lack of precision in vital areas. Nonetheless, if you can live with its faults, what you have here is the most complete war simulator available on Xbox.
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