Lets just say we have a foundation but the house hasn't been built yet.
When you get down to the basics of it all, Operation Flashpoint Dragon Rising is an arcade style military sim. It isn't an all out sim because the gameplay is too fast for that and there has been a lot of liberties taken with reality in favour of adding more fun (which is fine, as long as you aren't expecting a sim). It also isn't an action packed ride like you would expect from Modern Warfare 2 or the likes because yes! at times you have to use your head and think about your plan of attack. You also have a choice of what angle you would like to launch your attack from, you can even split up your squad and attack from different sides, and the coop is a lot of fun to play if you wanted to work some real stratagy in your game but this is where everything starts to go wrong (which I'll discuss a little later)
In fairness the graphics are ok based on the size of the environment, some of the atmospheric effects are really nice, the models are relatively high poly and the particles and lights are quite nice (not amazing, but they make the grade). Again, I would have liked to see a bit more realism, like night time just isn't dark enough for me (even when I turned the weather to stormy on the editor) and they kind of have these washed out colours running through the game with post effects which really make things look dull at the best of times, but it all is acceptable again considering they have to deal with a very large terrain.
So, the big flaw, and quite a big one at that is the gameplay itself. I mean, they have built a really nice foundation for this game. The graphics, the controls (apart from the command selection which should have been done more like battlefield where you can select commands while moving!), the sounds and the overall feel of the game are fine, but they did so very little with that. This game has a landmass that could take you 9 hours to walk across in one sitting, but there are only 12 levels, of which most of them can be completed in under an hour if you get everything right! It has a mass of different vehicles to choose from but you only ever really get to ride a car and for a moment a helicopter (unless you go looking for them) and even then, you don't really HAVE to use it, you just can if you want! They have this wonderful day night transition system, but none of the levels last long enough for you to see the day turn to night of visa versa. You have IR nades and different coloured smoke that you never have to use. Most of the different types of weapons make little or no impact on the game. You see helicopters and hardly even blink when you do so since they seem to be blind and never really trouble you unless you ask them to (and by asking I mean wave your gun in the air and fire some shots at them) and even when they do shoot at you, they are a VERY bad shot (I'd like to have to hide when I see them and scurry for a SAM or something rather than just ignore them).
Everything is VERY scripted to the point you realise that AI is almost non existant. Like in the editor I put units in an area full of cover and they didn't know how to use it, in the game I realised this was happening all the time, they seem to run out into the open or drop to the ground rather than try to get behind a wall. When you get your hands dirty with the editor (which I loved in fact because I got to play around with Lua script and it set me playing around with DOW2 editor which uses a modified version of it) I could see how little work was actually done on the game elements, and how much work had been put in to the actual game engine and system.
There are other things I could poke at but it all boils down to the same point. OFP:DR has a great framework and foundation but they haven't really built a game on it. After playing with the editor for a day I built a map which many of those that played it felt was better than some of the maps in the actual game, WHY? no, not because I'm an expert game designer (although I wish I was) but because not enough effort was put into creating the levels for the game itself. They didn't think about all the elements they had to play with and how that could make really exciting gameplay, they didn't use their large maps and realistic world to create an immersive experience, instead they tagged a few levels onto a very nice system and called it a game. So, my 7.5 score is based on many things, but the key elements are, we have a game, it isn't terrible but it could have been A LOT better, build the house I say! (DLC's)