Watered down tactical shooter? In my military simulation? It's more likely than you think.
Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising falls under the former types of simulations. The game might have a difficulty called hardcore that has the hud turned off but don't be mistaken, this game is not really a military simulation as it was initially toted to be. It's very confused actually on what it wants to be and as far as I can tell it wants to be a cross between Arma 2 and Ghost Recon. Not a bad idea but what went wrong?
First and foremost the game should have never been called Operation Flashpoint. Codemasters took a page from Ubisoft and acquired the rights to the name when Bohemia Interactive split away and then used the name later on for a completely unrelated title in order to boost sales and hype. If you want to see it done a little more shamelessly, see: Far Cry 2. The original Operation Flashpoint was a military sim. Dragon Rising is nothing like the original, so if you were expecting a similar experience stop reading now and go check out Arma or Arma 2, they're the real sequels made by Bohemia Interactive. This game is more casual and has some major issues.
I'll break it down to make it easier.
AI - Now one of the main selling points of the genre is large scale combat with complex AI. Dragon Rising suffers some major problems in this department. Non-scripted AI is almost non-existant. Additionally the AI seems to deliberately miss on purpose to prolong firefights, I don't know if they actually do it's just what I observed, it makes a cool effect and helps battles last longer but proves to be frustrating when you just want to move on. For example, I ordered the gunner in an APC to engage a PLA soldier not 15 yards away who was on the porch of a house. I watched as my gunner proceeded to squeeze off bursts from his machinegun just to watch as the bullets seemed to hit all around the enemy but never actually connect. I thought this kind of bizarre so I hopped in the seat myself and killed the enemy with my first shot, it was incredibly simple. The conclusion I've drawn from this is the AI deliberately misses, either that or they've been programmed horrendously. They cannot handle vehicles at all and will often drive themselves into objects and get stuck, gunners have problems as I just mentioned, and the path-finding on foot is questionable. I ordered my fire team to advance about 500 meters ahead of my position. Here's a quiz. Do they A. Take the direct route going through woods? B. Go to the left and walk down an open road exposing themselves? or C. Walk about 50 meters to the right off the side of an extremely steep hillside and then struggle to climb back up? If you guessed C you were right. I was a little boggled by this but luckily reissuing the order fixed the problem, they corrected their course and moved along the bottom until they found a way up and went through the woods. Open engagements are another problem, the AI seems to dramatically decrease in accuracy at extended ranges. I've found that at 50-100 meters they stand a solid chance of a least putting some bullets my way, at 100-200 meters they oddly seem to shoot several degrees off to the left and right of where my men and I were, and at 200-300+ meters their accuracy is so bad as to be comical. The AI cannot properly use anti-tank weapons like the SMAW, they seem to always fire short. Rushing the AI is easy as well, they react slowly to your presence and rarely display any kind of self-preservation. Once I was wounded and bleeding out and my team decided they would come to the rescue so one by one they ran out and were shot and one by the one the survivors decided to volunteer and do the same, the PLA guy had to have been I don't know 10 yards away, yet nobody shot him first, I had to be saved and there was no time to secure the area. I watched my whole team die to a guy who could have been killed with a pistol easily.
Engine - The game uses Codemaster's often hyped Ego technology. The same thing that powered DiRT and DiRT 2. Visually the game is not all that impressive. Textures look washed out and blurry, character models are low in detail, and though the draw distance is something like 30 kilometers objects and trees are only rendered up to a kilometer or two and grass drop off is very noticeable. Additionally the game always has a bizarre filter on everything, I suppose its for artistic value, but it makes everything look hazy and tinted puke shades of green and yellow. There is a real time day/night cycle that is never utilized, night missions are tremendously lit and negate the point of night vision, FLIR is done fairly well, and your weapons do have lasers that are visible under night vision goggles, though they are pointless in singleplayer as the AI does not respond to them and everything is so bright anyway. The engine can only handle 64 entities on screen at once. That's right 64. If you want an epic battle its going to be 32 vs 32 though most missions have your 4 man fire team going up against maybe 30 men tops. There isn't much in the way of physics, there's some bullet drop and rag doll physics and that's about it. Helicopter flight models are very poor, vehicles like to do corkscrews if you hit a bump or a rock the wrong way, and a thin little tree will make your Abrams battle tank bounce back in a humorous fashion. The engine choice was very poor though with all its technical limitations it does run very well. Some animations particularly loading animations for the rocket launchers are actually very well done though as a whole movement is very rough and feels unnatural. Control is awkward and unintuitive. The default control scheme has squad orders mapped to the WASD keys so to give a command you have to stop moving and navigate through menus. You cannot change weapons on the move easily either, opening the inventory causes your player to stop moving. The medic system is poorly implemented, it takes a page from America's Army. You get hit, you bleed, put a band-aid on it, you're good to go. Get hit in the leg you can't sprint anymore, get incapacitated and somebody has to come over and hold a medic bag over you until you're magically healed. It doesn't have much depth and seems more like a minor annoyance than a life or death situation.
Singleplayer - Dragon Rising has a campaign that's 10-11 missions long. Each mission lasts about half an hour so about 5 hours of gameplay. The story is initially set up in a little cutscene about China needing oil and taking over Skira Island where the whole game takes place. The USMC shows up and you are Dagger Bravo a small fire team that seems to do everything. Sometimes on a mission you will encounter other USMC teams or vehicles, just ignore them, they are useless and will probably die the minute combat starts. Dagger Bravo alone defeats the PLA on foot. You never really set foot in vehicles other than the occasional APC ride or hijacked truck/humvee. Not that you would want to anyway, they're death magnets that go into death rolls when you think bad things about them. Also there is no free look in vehicles for the driver in the vanilla version of the game, it has to be modded in. So unless you want to let the AI drive, don't by the way, you have to experience the awesome tunnel vision of a really narrow POV while trying to drive. But I digress, most missions in the game involve Dagger Bravo trudging across the barren countryside of Skira from one bland re-used set piece to another blowing something up or killing a few PLA. It's not even challenging either, like I mentioned the AI is pretty stupid so it's pretty much a game of walking from one turkey shoot to the next. The campaign isn't very impressive and with the DLC you get a couple free single missions but they aren't complex and are at best a minor distraction. Also you never get to choose your inventory, the game predefines what guns you have to start each mission with, and the PLA weapons are useless so you just end up sticking with the same gun throughout each level, it's a little boring.
Multiplayer - Doesn't exist. Codemasters left a lot of cool framework in and then screwed it up majorly with a couple of awful decisions. First of all the game doesn't have a CD key check or anti-piracy check of any kind so any pirate could play, not that it matters nobody plays anyway. The game shipped with three gametypes and 4 (yes I'm serious) multiplayer maps. You're probably wondering why there are maps to begin with, after all Skira is this massive open world, why not just fight there? You are on Skira, the game just pulls a Battlefield and kills you if you leave the area. I'm not sure why, I think it was to keep the action focused but just turned off everyone who played. There aren't really vehicles in multiplayer other than transport helos that I saw. There is ranked and unranked play and apparently you could rank up and eventually take on a serious leadership role. The framework shows support for battles up to beyond 64 players but only uses a tiny part of it. Apparently there's some kind of high command slots but I don't know if you can even access them or if anyone ranked up enough to even bother to try. There are no dedicated servers and when I did find a match (there were probably 5 servers at launch) immediately after starting about a fourth of each team would either disconnect or rage quit. The game supports 16 vs 16 play (PC version only) and each team has 4 fire teams of 4 and they're supposed to have different roles. Ones a helicopter team, ones a sniper team, ones an assault team, etc. When a player quits their spot is replaced with AI. There is no join in progress so often you spend a ton of time waiting for people to join just to have a large game. As of writing this review multiplayer is officially dead, I checked today and there are no servers running. There were three modes at the time, co-op campaign, which I heard was actually pretty fun, infiltration - a kind of get one team through the other kind of thing, and team deathmatch, you know the drill. Everyone just played TDM, and if you lost a teammate and got AI you could use the AI for cannon fodder. The multi was boring, small, and didn't have much value.
Editor - Like it's main competitor Dragon Rising shipped with a supposedly powerful mission editor. It is extremely limited however. 64 entity limits as I mentioned before, no true mods, no new islands, and it isn't even as simple to use as its competition's. I didn't play with it too much but from what I've seen I wasn't impressed. The one thing I will say is that you can use the editor to make the AI not so brain dead, whether you take that as a positive or an indication of the quality of the game is up to you.
That's the game in a nutshell. These issues along with a general lack of scale and ambition makes Dragon Rising one of the most disappointing titles of 2009. If you see it for cheap and want a budget tactical shooter give it a shot for the singleplayer. You'll get a few hours of gameplay and maybe even enjoy it. The community has performed a few miracles with the editor, nothing on the scale of what some competitive titles have come up with but for what they were working with I take my hat off to the extremely small Dragon Rising community. There's a sequel in the works, hopefully they've learned something for next time.