Operation Flashpoint: Red River
- Great, easy to use command screen - Lengthy campaign - Very realistic
The Bad:
- Missions looked awkwardly similar - Friendly AI sometimes a hindrance - No competitive multiplayer - Visually unimpressive - Slow, buggy shooting mechanics -
I'm going to start of by splitting the game genre into two parts:
Tactical - Great
Shooter - Well...
Operation Flashpoint: Red River is the third game in the OF series, following OF: Dragon Rising. This game is technically a first person shooter but it's not exactly a common shooter. See, the game focuses on the realistic, tactical side of things which it covers excellently. But as a whole the whole game felt broken. Simple things such as your gun vanishing to annoying things such as your friendly AI refusing to heal you made this game frustrating.
The characters were... well, OK at best. What made them even worse was that they tried to be snappy, it failed...
By the end of the game I felt like I didn't know the characters. They all sounded and pretty much looked and acted the same, they had no personality.
Touching on graphics, this game looked pretty bad. Another thing which kind of relates to graphics is that every mission you were in the same landscape. Plus only one of the missions was at night.
The Fire-team Engagement missions: Rubbish; Rushed - Don't touch this part of the game.
A major difference to OF:DR was that there was no competitive multiplayer modes. I was sad to see this as this was one of the things I loved about DR. Instead you had up to 4 player co-op mode which was actually pretty fun but I wanted to see multiplayer.
Now, to prevent people dying from all my negativity, lets look at the good points!
The game was fun. Campaign-wise anyway. Many people were complaining how it got boring easily but I found that only on the FE modes.
Another thing is the ability to command your team. This was fun and the command screen was easy to use.
Speaking of tactics, on realism this game gets a 9/10. It's the most realistic shooter I've played to date. But if anything the realism made the some of the games faults possible.
My last good thing was the length of the campaign. Short campaigns bore me. I was pleased with this factor.
Overall I can only recommend this game to newcomers or die-hard Operation Flashpoint fans.