There is something fundamentally scary about simulation games that keep me from getting anywhere close to one. Be it a driving sim like the Gran Tourismo series where I just am not able to figure out when to brake or the Microsoft Flight Simulator series, the controls of which I could never understand, managing to land my plane belly up even before even taking off. Besides the steep learning curve and the higher-than-normal difficulty factor, I have almost always considered them to be lacking in the fun quotient. This however reflects on my preferred kind of game genre and the afore-mentioned games have such huge fan-base of their own.

So when a copy of Operation Flashpoint 2: Dragon Rising (OF2) arrived at my doorstep, I was intrigued by it. At the core, it meant that I would get to hold a nice little gun to take down the baddies which has always appealed to my FPS favoring sensibilities. But then “features” like having to calculate the trajectories of the bullets, compensating for the drop due to the gravity and one-shot kills made me re-think if it would indeed be as much fun as I expected a military shooter to be? The horror stories about buggy gameplay and severely limited save points from the earlier Operation Flashpoint game did not help either. Will I enjoy playing this sim?

Before we see how it turned out to be, we have to know what the conflict is about. The game starts with hostilities breaking out between China and Russia over oil and gas reserves discovered in the fictional island of Skira, off the coast of Japan. Things take an ugly turn when Chinese take control of the Russian owned island. America, now a Russian ally, intervenes and sends its forces to the island to wrest back control from the Chinese. This is shown off in a rather slick presentation of slides which chronicles the events leading up to the Chinese setting up their shop on the island and acts as the opening cinematic at the start of the campaign mode.

The island itself is what makes the game quite unique. Skira happens to be a faithfully modeled re-creation of an actual island, Kiska, located near Alaska and which played host to combat during World War II. OF2 developers chose to recreate each and every peak and trough on the island, down to the smallest creek that can be found on Skira. The end result is a mammoth sand-box, hundred plus square miles in size affording a panoramic view of mountains, rolling plains and small hillocks with an amazing draw distance where enemy tanks appear to be no more than small dots on the horizon. All these combine to form a battlefield of scale like no other.

You will play as the fire-team leader of a US Marine Squad. Your objective over the course of the eleven single player missions is to guide your squad towards the objective and take it out without falling prey to the enemy bullets. For this, you will be using the command dial. Calling it up on screen will display the available command options that you can issue to your squad. Selecting one can branch out to other more specific commands. Getting your squad to follow you in a tight inverted V-formation and start shooting only when you do can be achieved by juts a couple of nudges on the command dial, letting you be in control of your squad at all times.

If done properly, your squad will work in tandem with you as beautifully as a Bolshoi ballet, obediently sneaking up to the marker designated by you and taking position behind any available piece of cover. They will faithfully report enemy activity which will then show up on your compass and map. Calling up the map will give you a wider view of the map and you and your enemy positions. You can either opt to assault the target as a single unit or split up your squad into smaller units to flank the enemy, all can be done by issuing orders through the map. In that, the map proves to be an excellent ally if you want to set down a cleverly planned strategic strike on the enemy.

Planning for your next move is extremely important in this game as a single bullet can put to an end a miscalculated advance. The sheer size of the map means you will be often deprived of a direct line-of-sight at the enemy even if you can see its approximate location on the map. Even if you do, forget about drawing a bead on the enemy from hundreds of meters away; the realistic weapon physics and bullet-drop means you will have to know how high to aim and how to compensate for the recoil, unless you want to alert the enemy with a shot that just manages to splinter the wood on the roof. Plan it well though and it all plays out beautifully.

For their part, enemies will skillfully avoid your fire, duck behind walls and sand-bags and try to out-flank you. A hit enemy, instead of waiting for you to finish him off, will immediately drop to the ground and try to crawl away from your line-of-sight. If you do not finish them off soon, they just might as well get revived by their comrades and re-join the fight. Except for an occasional bout of stupidity, the enemy AI is very competent when it comes to taking you and your squad on. Combine that with the realistic nature of damage a bullet can cause and you really have to think twice before stepping out in the open or re-loading your gun in the midst of a fire-fight.

Being a military sim means you have to get the hardware right unless you want to piss off all the military nuts out there. OFDR doesn’t disappoint you there, what with all the guns, both the American and Chinese re-created down to the last details, complete with their alternate fire modes, real-life range and bullet-trajectories. Reload animations have been so faithfully re-created that re-loading a shouldered fire SAM would mean you will see your solider place the launcher on ground, insert the rocket and then lug it onto his shoulders again, taking a good 10 seconds to do so. Weapon models could have used a bit more of detailing though.

Inexplicably though, the game falls short on the vehicles part, even though it features a wide range of drivable vehicles like jeeps, APC’s, helicopter gunships and tanks. Land based vehicles don’t handle as well as expected from a game engine that runs GRID so well. Helicopters fare much better though you would still need quite a bit of practice before you can fly mission sorties without getting shot down or landing belly-up. Even the game doesn’t give much of an incentive for using the vehicles. You will be running across the map for most of the time anyways, even with all these mean looking machines around you.

All the missions in the story mode as well as few more extra missions can be played in co-op and that is where it gets really fun. Having your friends join up to clear out the objectives is a blast, especially if you can co-ordinate as a team, issuing and more importantly, following orders. An errant member can be quickly struck dead by the games tethering system if he decides to strike out on his own and drift away from the main team. If a co-op player drops out, an AI controlled player will take over and do a pretty good job at it. At least they healed me every time I asked for it unlike my friend who was busy switching his NVG on and off all the while.

Getting into a multiplayer match, featuring two modes, Annihilation and Infiltration is much more difficult. With the absence of dedicated servers, it can get really nasty with high pings and lot of lag. The lobby system in place would not let you join a game already in progress even if it is not completely full. Even if you get into one before the game starts, you have to wait until the host decides to start the game which can be quite a wait if the host is busy fixing himself a sandwich, which seems to happen all the time. Last heard, Codemasters were trying to get a patch out to address much of the issues as well as dedicated servers to appease the gamers.

Graphically, the game handles very well on even a fairly new system. Rendering those huge rolling plains could have been taxing but the engine takes it in stride. Except for a few missing shrubs, you would hardly notice anything amiss. Smoke from explosion drifts across the landscape, mist shrouds a grove that you have to sneak through at night and explosions effects are subdued, like in real-life rather than going up in a huge ball of fire. There is not much variety in landscape except for an area being greener then the previous but then again, it is one single island after all. Strangely, the game doesn’t let you tweak any graphical details except resolution, v-sync and AA.

If you can ignore the really stupid theme song, the sound design has been well implemented. Bullets ping and ricochet of metal. Artillery fire lands on buildings with a satisfying “whump”. Fighters plane roar overhead, unloading their deadly arsenal of JDAMS on the enemy formations below. All these sounds have been faithfully recreated, right down to the sound of you unzipping your side pouch to take out side-arm or the sound of your weapons clinking against each other as your crouch-sprint across the field in the dead of the night, your breath coming in gasps. All of these add up together to build a great atmosphere in game.

Operation Flashpoint 2 will reward any gamer that shows enough patience and a basic understanding of strategizing with an immensely satisfying single player experience. Those looking for a quick fix of shooting baddies down corridors would better wait for fast-paced shooters like Modern Warfare 2 releasing a month from now. But those who understand and appreciate the beauty of a military sim game would love the fact that the game gives you hardly any margin for error, consigning you to the same fate that you would have endured in a real battlefield; a bullet to the head.

8.5 / 10
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• game_kid Says:
  Friday, October 23rd, 2009 06:52 pm GMT +5.5 at 6:52 pm

  Nice review I did a small review of this game as well for XBOX 360, hope you guys publish it……..

• Devon Abbas Says:
  Wednesday, June 30th, 2010 10:10 am GMT +5.5 at 10:10 am

  Thank you for this post. I have used a long time to looking for the best airplane flight simulator online and now I think I have got it . BTW, there is another simulator out there which is also very well : http://airplane-flight-simulator.learnmoreskills.com .