Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising (PlayStation 3)

Enemy AI can do everything your AI can and the beauty of Dragon Rising is that the AI is non-scripted. It’s adaptive and reactive, it will use tactics, flanking manoeuvres, cover, concealment, stances, fire modes, vehicles and available gun emplacements/weapons to its advantage and at times it’s an eagle eyed shot, capable of shooting out your grey matter for 300m away. It’s a ruthless adversary like this that transforms Dragon Rising into a truly excellent tactical game. To create an engagement between forces in Dragon Rising, all the developers need to do is drop two opposing sides down and then let them fight it out. You can see this in action in the first mission, with a support squad inserted by chopper on a nearby hill.

Depending how you perform, you can help them to win against the enemy or watch them fight it out snickering from a hidey-hole (this is not advisable) as they perish in a hail of gunfire or manage to win against superior odds. For this reason alone, I can forgive OFP: DR many of the AI faults and amusing chopper related crashes.

Sound

Sound design for the game is packed with detail. The developers recorded their weapon sounds from free-fire ranges and various sources, and the same for vehicles. They spent ages making sure that everything you hear in Dragon Rising comes from the real thing. The game also has some great situational and ambient sounds, such as the island at night under a full moon. The atmosphere and tension remains throughout since you may have NVGS or a night-ops scope...but there’s a chance your enemy is equipped with them as well. It’s exacerbated by the slick sound design and clever use of authentic night time noises. Top marks for the sound design all round. What really impressed me was listening to the sound of gunfire, as bullets ping of metal, skid close to your head and whistle past your ears you instinctively begin to duck as you’re playing the game alongside your on-screen counterparts.

Music

A very interesting main theme runs through the game, usually at key points the music can kick in and provide a nice counterpoint to the action. Mostly though the music you’ll hear is that of the menu screens and the chattering sound of gunfire as you duck for cover. I wouldn’t mind a soundtrack from Dragon Rising, hint-hint Codemasters!

Script/Dialogue

The attention to detail here is excellent, as USMC soldiers use authentic commands and phonetics. There’s not much in the way of story script since it’s delivered in the actual game itself as orders and talkback from HQ. The voice work is solid, since it’s broken up into chunks to allow you to give out orders and for your soliders to reply in kind. It doesn’t sound stilted most of the time and you can actually understand the various soldiers, each with their own distinctive voice and personality in combat. What is impressive is that Codemasters have made sure that you have different levels of voice. So when you’re in combat and weapons free, you’re loud, you’re shouting over gunfire. When you’re at night and moving with a fire on my lead order or hold fire, then you’re whispering and giving the impression you’re actually sneaking around. In normal travel with no significant threats, you can expect a fairly normal sounding voice.

Multiplayer

So here we are at last, the part many of you will have been waiting for or skipped to the end to read. Yes, it has multiplayer, online with ranked and player matches, offline via system link and basically supports the following modes:

Adversarial: Annihilation, two teams are at war on the island, they have access to everything pretty much from single player and all hell breaks loose. There are AI units and equipment and you begin at the opposite end of the map selected by the host, may the best team win either through a pre-set score or when the timer runs out.

Infiltration: Team A (Spec Ops) must infiltrate and destroy an objective on the map, whilst Team B (defenders) must secure and hold the location where the objective is. This mode forces the attacking team to use covert tactics and operations techniques to accomplish their objective since they are often against much larger numbers and better equipped foes. Team B wins if they kill Team A.

Then there’s cooperative play, either with a full team of 4 human players or a mix of 2-3 human players with the last slots occupied by AI. You can either play the Campaign with your friends from mission to mission watching the story unfold as you work together or jump right into favourite maps you have completed in story and play them as a single mission. This is where the infra-red marker on your gun comes in handy since you can use it to help point out objects or soldiers in the world and anyone with NVG’s equipped at night will see it.

Online supports 2-8 players with AI filling out the rest of the squads and fire-teams on the maps. Cooperative supports 2-4 players and the AI will take up the remaining soldier slots.

The multiplayer is a lot of fun either adversarial, especially Infiltration and the coop experience is excellent, barring one minor niggle. If your whole team dies then its back to the start of the mission, since checkpoints are only to allow respawn locations for your squad members. So if you lose a man and you can’t win, withdraw and wait for them to respawn back in or you’ll be back at square one regardless. I would have preferred to return to my last checkpoint in that regard on Normal and could understand it happening on Experienced or Hardcore, but it may put certain players off.

All in all

This is one of the best military sandboxes since Operation Flashpoint, it has less bugs than ArmA and ArmA 2 and offers a wealth of replay value since the dynamic unscripted AI provides more than enough challenge on repeated plays of the same map. This game deserves to be on any serious military shooter fans shelf and regardless of some niggles and bugs mentioned with the AI and physics, it’s a good quality game.