Well, I had seen screenshots of this game months ago in Game Informer, and knew I wanted to check this one out. The story is fictional, but based on real world events. The story seems very plausible. In the game, the Chinese have run out of fuel, and have invaded an island off the coast of Russia. Russia and China face off at the border of the mainland, and in the interest of avoiding all out war, Russia requests U.S. intervention on the island. The U.S. sends in the Marines from bases in Japan to respond.
The game has a single player campaign, co-op campaign, and multiplayer online modes. There are 3 difficulty levels for the campaign, and I have heard rumblings in some forums regarding the difficulty of this game. The fact of the matter is, this is a realistic military simulator, thus is not forgiving of a player standing up in the open. I have caught myself run and gunning like I tend to do in most shooters, and have paid the price for it. Once I fell back on my real life military training, and started to initiate contact, then flank or move firing positions frequently, I found myself doing much better.
The realism in this game is unrivaled. I was impressed to see the game place enemy strong points, checkpoints and ambushes in realistic locations. Rookie mistakes like traveling in a vehicle on the roads, or running along the top of a ridge instead of just below it, will get you killed pretty quickly.
This realism can be the high point or low point in this game depending on what kind of gamer you are. If you are a run and gun gamer, you will hate humping it (walking) to the next objective, and that you don’t magically heal after a few seconds of rest. On the other hand, I appreciate that being injured will hamper you for the rest of the mission. Objectives are placed far apart, so you spend quite a bit of time between action, though it is still abbreviated compared to what it would be in real life. A typical mission can take up to an hour to complete. As much as it seems to take a long time, I would be hard pressed to complete the objectives and walk those distances in that time. The reload time for weapons are fast and well practiced in real life, but will seem slow when compared to other shooters.
My complaints are minor, such as the squad is smaller than I would like. If I was really tasked with these missions in real life, 3 other members would seem light on the firepower, but for the game it makes it easier to keep track of your squad and assign them to tasks. The call for fire missions use improper grid zone designators and do not require adjustments. Another complaint is the driving. The driver is stuck looking forward and the vehicle tends to skid out a lot. When the vehicle gains any type of speed, it controls like every surface is made of mud. My final complaint is the lack of recoil. Machine guns don’t even have any recoil. The .50 cal shoots to the exact same spot over and over again, even when firing long bursts.
Overall, I really enjoy this game. The engagement distances are realistic, (100-300 meters) you need to factor in bullet drop when firing at distance targets (bullets seem to fall below the crosshairs when targets are at 300 meters), radio chatter is authentic, real world tactics work and are necessary to survive. Realism seems to be the overwhelming selling point in this game, and I think the developers were very successful at it. For the run and gunner gamers, I could see where this game would get frustrating due to the realism at the cost of constant adrenaline. My complaints were mostly nit-picking the little details, and show that I only had the little things to really complain about.
Twinfinite's Henry McMunn revisits Codemaster's military simulator and realises it was actually really great all along.
Dragon Rising wasn't bad, but it had a lot of questionable design choices. Red River was just horrible in every aspect, huge step down from DR.
Yup, Dragon Rising had some potential, but it was way too restricted from what I remember. Red River was indeed horrible. Wish I hadn't wasted the money on that one.
Ugh I just remembered this game and it makes me want to me sick in a bowler hat and drown myself in it....
The only good thing about this game was borderlands was out a week later!
Dragon Rising was a really great idea but with Codemaster's typically shoddy execution of anything not racing related. Their poor handling of the criticism, bugs and outright lies on the packaging was eerily similar to EA's BF4 flustercluck. The game was a breath of fresh air in many ways and was really the only truly tactical, open map shooter of it's kind on consoles. Anyone who played the original Flashpoint or ARMA games would feel pretty comfortable with Dragon Rising. It's just a pity Codemasters dropped the ball completely on the online portion, allowed several annoying bugs to remain to this day and lied about features in the game and later charged for these promised features as DLC. With the way they handled the whole situation, Codemasters earned the first spot on my ever expanding list of developers that I refuse to buy anything from them. Again, much like BF4, you can easily see the awesome game it could have been and yet it's still totally out of reach.
There are games wich shine with light. However, not all games have the same opportunity to receive support from their editors.
This results in remarkable games, even outstanding, which have been forgotten or, unfortunately, were never known by the mass audience. Even their reviews, do not capture the true quality of the title, since most anticipated games, are unfortunately better received in the newsroom.
Part I: Hidden gems in First Person Shooters
R834 and The_Stacked_Nerd review 2009 tactical FPS Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising.
The_Stacked_Nerd: "My first impressions of this game were rather, let’s say, enthusiastic. The box was detailed and explosive – what I generally look for in a FPS – and the story was set in the modern day, something I generally appreciate as there are normally a range of great weapons to be tested.Once we started playing it, however, I realised that it was, in my opinion, utter rubbish."
Yeah - we're reviewing a whole backlog of games we own to add content to our site, which only opened on 2nd April.
...but that's not a good enough excuse for wasting bandwidth on reviews of old, crappy games. Since you're so new, your reviews/opinions are meaningless and irrelevant anyway, as you haven't built a rep yet. Starting out regurgitating old info, about old games that nobody cares about, isn't going to help you.
Write some original articles, review what's new, preview what's coming...you know, like a normal gaming site.
@sp1deynut
Who gives a shit what you think? He can do what he wants, it's his bandwidth.
Maybe next time you see one of his articles show a little self restraint and don't click on it.
And he may be new, but you haven't exactly been here a great length of time either.
@sp1deynut
Come on, that's a bit harsh.
I'm only "wasting bandwidth" on my site.
And your statement about having "meaningless and irrelevant" opinions is paradoxical: I can't write good articles because I have no rep, but I can't build up a rep because I don't have any articles... o_O
I'm not regurgitating anything - this is the first time my review for this game has been posted anyway, and I posted it to my site, which, as I previously said, is less than a week old.
I did write an (arguably) original article earlier this week, which ended up as Today's Hottest.
And, as a guy who is not currently receiving any income from the site, I would have to have a large amount of money sitting around to be able to buy enough brand new games to fill your review quota.
And properly previewing what's coming is difficult when I have no way of personally playing upcoming games, so I would just be "regurgitating" other the opinions of other people who have played those upcoming games.
"Normal" gaming sites like, say, IGN, make a lot of money from their site, so have enough money to hire writers and buy in games, and they have such a large reputation that games developers send them their games to review.
As a small site by just two people, getting no money from the site, I think that's going to be difficult.
But thanks anyway.
Wow. The only good thing about reading this review was that I know not to trust your site for reviews. Ever. While the game had some issues, it's clear that you attempted to play a sim style game as just another Call of Duty clone. I wish I could have been there to ridicule whoever played it. While the UI sucked balls, I got used to it and was able to use my team effectively. The game is clearly made for co-op play, but the AI is plenty good enough if used properly. All in all, I thought Dragon Rising didn't quite live up to it's potential, but it's hardly as bad as this review makes it sound. I'm looking forward to the sequel in a couple of months.
A review is just an opinion, and in this particular review, you have the opinion of two people. In my personal opinion, there were still many points that needed to be refined.
Prior to this, I had played only one Call of Duty game - World at War. I played Dragon Rising shortly after playing WaW, which is why I attempted to use the CoD control scheme.
I did not, however, try and use Call of Duty tactics. I'd played the Dragon Rising demo on PC quite a bit, so I knew roughly what to do. I snuck around, keeping to cover as much as I could and only died when I reached the section I talked about, after I'd travelled 1.8km on foot.
And I *was* there to ridicule The_Stacked_Nerd, as we were using the PSN text chat feature while playing at the same time.
From what I have personally experienced, the AI is incredibly dumb.
But, as I said at the end of my article, I will persevere and continue to play this game.
I'm sorry you did not like this article. :(
