Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising Review [PC]

It's hard, initially, to fault Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising. The instant it kicks off with you touching down, in a helicopter, onto the lightly-defended outpost of Skirinka Island prior to the assault on Skira, the world completely sucks you in. It's getting on for dusk, so everything is hued in a beautiful orange as the sun goes down, and the tall wild grass twists gently in the breeze. Within a few minutes, everything will be black, because you'll have been shot in the head and your brain matter will be fertilising the ground.

Dragon Rising is a hard, hard game. On Normal difficulty there are enough concessions to the casual player – a compass that shows the positions of spotted enemies, whacking great objective markers, waypoints showing recommended paths - that they'll only die once every few minutes. On the hardest setting, there's no HUD. There's no anything. Hell, you have to remember how many bullets you've fired so that you don't come up short, and you'll constantly be checking your map to make sure you're going in the right direction.

Aiding you is the full might of the US Marine Corps, of which three soldiers are under your command, and they, too, can be given orders from your map. More interesting is giving them orders in the game, which works through one of the concessions to the dreaded Console Players: the radial menu. This little tool lets you give any potential order through a series of expanding menus, as well as one or two context-sensitive buttons. Target a building and open it up, and the “Move” order will be replaced with “Assault building.” If you want to stop your soldiers firing, you need to go to Tactical, then ROE (Rules of Engagement), then “Fire on my lead” or whatever you want them to do. In this way you can order them to flank or pull back; they can lay down suppressing fire or storm a building.

It's a concession to the console players simply because it's built for use with the console D-pad, which doesn't quite function on a PC. Don't get me wrong – it's perfectly responsive, and once you get your head around the way it works, you'll be able to give orders rapidly. However, what would be up/down/left/right on the D-pad are bound to WSAD on the PC, which means that you can't move when giving orders. It's not a huge problem, but it does mean that if you get surprised while in the middle of sorting out some individual orders, you've got to remember to close the menu before trying to move, or your soldiers will probably take your mash of commands to mean that they're to greet the lieutenant governor of American Samoa by slapping him in the bottom with a fish. (As an aside, you'd be amazed at how difficult it is to get hold of a good fish in a combat situation.)

By and large, your soldiers are obedient to a fault, although a little more common sense wouldn't go amiss. Unless their morale breaks they'll pretty much stick to doing whatever you told them to do, which might result in them getting killed if someone gets around behind them, but they'll also “forget” things once they've accomplished them. Setting the Rules of Engagement to “Fire on my lead” is great, and works perfectly; they won't open fire until you do. But unless you remember, after the firefight, to once again set those Rules of Engagement, they're going to start shooting as soon as they see enemies.

Despite the lack of D-pad, the PC squad controls shine brightly over the 360 ones. You can use the number keys to select any soldier, or any group of soldiers, whenever you're giving orders – whether in the map or using the radial dial in the thick of the action – which means that once you've gotten accustomed to said dial, or used to the pseudo-RTS controls on the map, you can quickly and concisely order each individual to do what you want them to do. It's brilliant.

The shooting is equally brilliant. The choice of weapon affects rate of fire, noise, accuracy, and everything else you'd expect, but the smaller changes have equal impact. Different types of scope range from a dot sight for close-in assaults to zoomed scopes at range, and a wonderful night scope that shows up heat signatures in bright white. Better still is that, despite the odd AI quirk, you can see the effects of your attacks on your foes. Start shooting at someone running towards you and you'll see them hit the deck and crawl for cover. Suppressing fire works well, and the visual effects – the kicked up clods of earth that temporarily blot your vision – mean that you'll do exactly the same when bullets start whizzing past your head. Enemies drop smoke and pull back to regroup, reinforcements pour in when the fighting kicks off proper, and staying on top of things on the hardest settings requires an immense amount of concentration.