I'd never played any of the OFP games before this one and I'm impressed, it has been too long since there's been an approachable military tactical like the GRAW and Rainbow Six Vegas games. One thing you should do if you are only a slightly more than casual player is get a trainer/cheat, otherwise it's too realistic and it seems like you would die a lot as you are expected to work miracles in some missions. It's also not that large of a game in terms of GB's and the missions and number of commands are not ponderously huge like the ARMA games.
The missions are made pretty clear by HQ and you have HUD checkpoints and objectives as well as a map to keep you moving towards the objectives. Commands to your team are easily done with the radial menu in game by pushing the Q button and navigating to your command via the WSAD buttons. This is also how you call in support like mortars, artillery and airstrikes. You can also give commands via the map screen but it's not really recommended as the map is only zoomable to a grid size, not a tactical size. Once you give your command you announce it in the grid coordinates, which seems a little overdone when you are just ordering your team to a point you can see, I can see this making sense for out of visual contact things like the artillery and the like though. A bad thing is that when you order your team to move to a point it seems it takes them a long time to get there or they don't move there when under fire, what's the point of ORDERS then? Another thing is if you have to jump out of a vehicle and run to stay alive your team NEEDS to be ordered to follow you, as if.
Vehicles are pretty straight forward to get into and either drive or be a passenger and you can switch to a swingman view for this if you want. You can only see immediately in front while in swingman/follower view though instead of using the mouse to look left/R/behind so that's a negative aspect of the vehicles. All I saw that you can use is 4 wheel cars, no tanks or planes.
The missions are pretty huge as far as ground to cover and non-planned objectives and there's a good variety of shoot em up focused ones and stealth missions. I'd like to see some city combat situations though instead of the almost total mission time in the mountains/fields. Also I've been in mission and seen the time of day ambient light change which is a nice touch. At times the checkpoint autosaves can be a little too far apart if you do go down but it wasn't a big problem with my God mode trainer. You can also fail a mission by not doing certain things in an allotted time or being detected when stealth is a mission necessity. At times it does seem to be a long time just hiking to your next objective but it leaves vehicles and enemies at good points in between to break it up.
I found the weapons to be accurate graphically and in sound to real assault rifles as I've fired a few of the real things. Also the difficulty in hitting a target seems about right. If you've never fired a weapon at a target you can't possibly know how much skill is involved, it's hard to hit a target at 8 feet with a 9 mm handgun due to many factors and this is also true of any other firearm. So that's not a legitimate gripe.
Overall graphically this is pretty good for the huge environments, It seems to make a nice tradeoff in that respect. Every little thing in the game is not top quality detailed like buildings or vehicles but that's not the real fun of the game anyways. The characters and weapons are nicely done and that's what you see most of the time anyways. I'm not sure how much of a system hog this is as I have a quad core 6600 and an 8800GT and 3GB RAM so most games don't touch my system but it doesn't seem to be unreasonable. It auto detected my system about where it should be at 1680x1050 and it ran smooth at all times. The sound was great, very nice buzzing bullets and helos as well as ambient outdoors sounds.
One thing I'd like is to choose my own loadout, it's pretty ridiculous going to take out an AAA site and not even carrying a heavy weapon capable of taking out the armored AAA vehicles. You have to find one of the crates that are around with different, usually enemy, weapons in them to get what you need at times. I think at least one of your squad should carry a bazooka of some sort at all times. And it would be nice to choose a silencer and a scope other than a red-dot, look at the guys in Iraq and you'll see that at least one of a squad has an ACOG 4x scope. Usually it's the commander, which you are in this game, that has that. So you are at the mercy of what is given to you as far as weapons unless you want to take the crappy but scoped Chinese stuff off of a casualty.
The story is explained in flash/graphics instead of cutscenes at the very beginning of the campaign missions and that's fine. I found the story to be a little unbelievable though as far as Americans fighting for Russia's interests, I don't think anyone in the USA would want Americans doing that. It's hard enough to take Americans dying for ungrateful and undeserving Iraqis, Serbians, Africans and others. Who cares, in terms of strategic US interests, about an island north of Japan anyways? The part where the Chinese invade Eastern Russia is totally believable though, as when you have 1.5 billion people you need a lot of resources and there's a lot of that in E. Russia. The overall story doesn't really intrude on the game though and that's a good thing, this is just a straight tactical military simulator and that's how you look at it, one objective to the next.
Overall I loved this game and will probably play it again, especially since you can choose individual missions once you've finished the campaign or just go get a full save game on the net. Obviously this is going to have add-on packs like OFP1 did so it is a game that will last a long time. I'm getting the OFP1 GOTY edition which has all the add on packs included after playing this one, it's great and recommended!Get more detail about Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising.
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