You can’t go in without a plan.
Maybe you could get away with it when facing a couple of online newbies, but
when tackling the AI, strategy is a must. Whether you’re ready or not, enemy
soldiers will be watching, often from within seclusion or standing so far away
that you won’t even notice their presence until the first bullet is fired. By
then it might be too late; this isn’t a game of instant bandages and
auto-regenerating shields. This is a game that, while not 100% true to its
realistic claim, is much less forgiving than the leading first-person shooters.
Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising
doesn’t look brutal. It’s not until you die suddenly at the hands of AI soldiers
(programmed with more depth than you’ll ever expect) that the game begins to
show its true colors.
Armed with little more than a
machinegun (it has a secondary function for shooting grenades but is still
fairly weak), throwing grenades, and a medic pack to stop wounds from bleeding,
the game’s introductory mission is not easy. This is a huge contrast from the
average shooter (or any action game for that matter), especially when you add in
the tutorial elements, which should by all accounts make the first mission a
dud. It isn’t.
Exploring the world for the first
time, you’ll be greeted by controls that are painfully slow. At least, that’s
the first thought that will come to mind – that the controls are indeed painful.
But within a matter of minutes, that feeling goes away. The slow speed no longer
feels unnatural, which is somewhat shocking when you consider what a lack of
speed has done to other action games. In this case, however, it was intentional;
the developers weren’t looking to make a Halo or Call of Duty clone. They
weren’t trying to make a game that could have made its way into arcades (not
that many shooters did, but had arcades lasted, the industry appeared to be
heading in that direction). The developers were aiming for realism, and like it
or not, superhuman running speeds do not fit into that realm.
Dragon Rising is somewhat of a
squad-based shooter, allowing players to hook up with others for team-based
action or enter a single-player game with a bunch of AI comrades. The latter
puts you in a familiar setting where you’ll use the D-pad to issue commands and
hope your allies listen. They won’t always, but this is definitely the kind of
feature that will come in handy whenever a hard-to-see enemy turns you into body
bag material. Though it isn’t foolproof, one of the ways of dealing with this
frequent challenge is to use your allies to go in first and distract them. If
you’re lucky, they might actually kill the enemy and eliminate the threat
altogether.
The other control features stay
close to the genre’s unofficial rulebook, minus the over-the-top jumping ability
found in so many shooters. You won’t be leaping sky-high in Dragon Rising, but
you can get behind the wheel of an abandoned vehicle and start driving
instantly, proving that some fictional elements will always be necessary in
games – even games that are trying to be realistic.
If you like to cruise aimlessly, it
should be noted that these vehicles can’t compare to Far Cry 2. Also, the
first-person view is a little weird since the camera is positioned just behind
the vehicle’s front end, and when you enter and exit, the screen goes black to
compensate for the lack of animations. Aside from being a visual nuisance – not
to mention a cheap way to avoid producing a graphic effect that’s fairly
standard these days – the black screen can be somewhat dangerous. If you exit
while driving (crazy, yes, but Grand Theft Auto taught me to do it), you’ll have
to look around for a couple seconds to figure out where your car went after the
black screen is lifted. That’s a far cry from, well, Far Cry’s way of handling
it, and certainly can’t compare to the Grand Theft Auto series, which visualizes
everything in real-time regardless of the character’s viewpoint.
However, Dragon Rising isn’t really
about the vehicles, nor was it made to be a graphically breathtaking game.
Contrary to most shooters, the realism comes from the gameplay, not the
graphics. Unlike the screenshots on the box and some that are online, which were
handpicked (and possibly enhanced) for promotional purposes, the actual in-game
graphics are average. There are a couple of cool visual touches, my favorite
being the subtle focus changes that occur when using the scope, which
selectively and realistically blurs unnecessary parts of the background. But the
environments are iffy, the explosions are plain, the death animations are
generic, and most structures are rock-solid objects that can’t be destroyed.
Dragon Rising may not be for
everyone, and it may not have the power to turn heads in the way its
graphically-rich competitors can. But if you want a deeper, more challenging
(and at times more meaningful) shooter experience than the average run-and-gun
FPS, Dragon Rising can provide you with one that ranked realism as high as its
entertainment value without sacrificing a thing.
|
|
Gameplay: 8.0
Intense and often brutal, Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising is a deep,
strategy-filled combat experience. Its flaws, mind you, are technical and
visual; the combat, however, is excellent.
Graphics: 6.9
Excluding a few moments of amusement, Dragon Rising is far from being the
best-looking PS3 shooter.
Sound: 6.0
Not much to it. The music and sound effects are too subtle for their own
good. In the case of a war game, that wasn’t necessarily the most sound
decision the developers could make.
Difficulty: Medium/Hard
Brace yourself for one of the most difficult first-person shooters of the
year.
Concept: 7.5
Not exactly a fresh concept, but certainly a fresh execution for a console
FPS.
Multiplayer: 7.5
The slower pace of the game is not as easy to embrace when facing real
combatants; it’s still intense but isn’t quite as rewarding.
Overall: 7.7
An excellent shooter that, like so many, fails to deliver a flawless
experience, Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising is a game that most everyone
should play. It wasn’t designed for everyone; the average Halo junkie may not be
amused by Dragon Rising’s cutthroat gameplay. But everyone should at least give
it a try, if only to see that there are other ways of developing a first-person
shooter, some of which can be wonderful – as long as you give them the chance.
