Somehow, the label "Operation Flashpoint" landed on a poor Delta Force game.
What I want to discuss is the total lack of any resemblance to the original - and brilliant - Operation Flashpoint (" OF"). Oh sure, in Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising (" OF:DR") there's guns too. But other than that, it does not deserve the title "Operation Flashpoint" at all.
I will explain. In the original OF, you took the role of several recruits. One minute you're in training, and the next you are ambushed while on a routine patrol. You don't know what's going on, and why. At some point you get seperated from your squad and have to find a way from one end of an island to another. Talking about total immersion in a game: the part in which I ran through a forest with a Hind circling above it trying to blow me up, still brings a smile to my face.
Or the part where I had to sneak into a base and blow up a tank, but instead I hijacked another tank and tore the whole base apart. Or the mission where I had to go to a certain spot but instead I went about 20 klicks the other way, found some base, stole a chopper and went back to my objective, with a litle surprise.
Onto OF:DR. The premise is great and I like fiction with China as a military superpower. The backing story is OK, but should have been voiced by the likes of Alec Baldwin (like World in Conflict, which worked great). Instead, a flashy MTV intro which thrusts the player into the story.
The gameplay is like Delta Force: go from A to B to C, using predefined waypoints which will trigger scripted events. There is no time to explore the island, because there's always some timed event which will go south if you don't complete your mission on time, like POW's that get shot, a planned helicopter raid which will fail if you don't take out the AA on time, and so on.
Nevertheless, OF:DR brags about the island being hundreds of square kilometres, but that's a total waste. Not that the vast landscape is filled with any interesting stuff, either: some farms, a small base, a small airport, a small village here and there. That's it.
OF:DR doesn't have a soul. It tries to combine Hollywoodstyle scripted events from Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare (which worked well in that game) with Delta Force gameplay, and put the whole thing together under the Operation Flashpoint flag. Totally inappopriate, and even an insult the the original game.