Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising PC Review Page 2

09 Oct 2009 at 15:25:02 by Tim McDonald
Systems used to review this title: (PC)

Those hardest settings deserve a bit more discussion, too. It doesn't seem as though the AI is affected by your choice of difficulty, but the fact that you no longer have indications as to when someone's been hit or killed, or a directional compass, or even an ammo count ratchets up the tension considerably. Those wanting an experience akin to the original game need to try this on Hardcore.

It's not all sunshine and rainbows, sadly. One of the most pressing issues is that the promise of a big open-world environment is a bit misleading. Yes, Skira is all there in its gigantic glory, but you're not really going to be trekking from one side of it to another in any given mission, and you're precluded from exploring by two things. The first is the circle of influence, which “kills” any of your squadmates who wander too far away from you. The second is that, with a few exceptions, almost every campaign mission has a time limit. Sometimes you have to knock out SAM sites before the bombers arrive. Sometimes you're defending a column of tanks as they roll towards a load of anti-tank soldiers. One way or another, though, you can't piss around and explore. You can't drive everything, either, which is a tad disappointing as I love going into combat in a tractor, but that's a minor issue. Your mileage will vary with the freedom complaint – it's very much a question of expectations – but it has to be said, because it makes the game a lot more linear than many were expecting.

Slightly more major are the scripting issues that crop up, particularly as you near the last few missions. One mission, played three times, gave me a dialogue line repeated a few times and then immediately after it, the response to an earlier line. That's minor. It gets worse when it prevents waypoints or objectives from triggering properly. It's rare, but it shouldn't happen.

If you're on PC, both of these are alleviated somewhat by the absolutely fantastic mission editor. If you want to create a single, gigantic mission spanning the entire island, you can. If – like me – you want to just plonk down 50 PLA soldiers and then give yourself a helicopter, you can do that too. To do anything major you need to become au fait with the Lua scripting language, but an appendix and a variety of examples in the editor mean that you can stumble by without much hassle if you have any experience in any real programming language. Bearing in mind I've not created a level since one of the Counter-Strike betas, it only took me an hour or so to create a short mission with triggers, objectives, and waypointed soldiers, opening with the PLA dropping artillery on a neatly-arranged row of tanks, before asking the player to steal a helicopter and blow up a truck. No, I don't know why either, which is why I'm extremely eager to see campaigns created by more capable hands than mine.

The other major thing that needs to be said about the PC version specifically is performance. Both the original Flashpoint and the more recent ArmA II suffered from massive performance issues, and this is something that – to my huge surprise – I haven't encountered with Dragon Rising. I've played it on two computers, one a slightly ageing hulk that can still take everything thrown at it, and the other a computer that has had difficulty with a few tiny indie titles I've put onto it. Both of them handled this with nary a framerate drop, with the latter at around 1280x1024.

Dragon Rising is a military sim, of sorts. It doesn't “feel” like the original did – it's a lot more polished, and it's not quite so unforgiving, despite some bastard difficulty spikes on the harder difficulties. It's also not perfect. Despite this, it is deeply, deeply enjoyable, particularly if you have a few friends to play co-op with. As our diaries show, the co-op removes the majority of the problems you'll have and is so much fun you're willing to forgive the rest, particularly with the game's pervasive grimy, muddy, military atmosphere and tension-amplifying difficulty sucking you right in.

So no. It's not quite like the original. But – whisper it – it's bloody good fun anyway.

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