I’ve attended one game AI lecture in my life. The biggest takeaway I got, learning from the experience of someone who’d designed AI for a number of real-time strategy games, was that sometimes you’ve got to cheat. In order to make a game harder, you can increase the amount of resources an AI opponent gains per harvest, let the AI see through the fog of war to anticipate the player’s assault, decrease the time it takes the AI to develop new techs, or a variety of other sneaky tricks. But the most important thing is to hide this from the players: if they don't know you're cheating, then they won't complain.
First-person shooters typically approach “hard” mode in a hamfisted manner. In Call of Duty games, enemies will be gifted with infinite grenades with which to spam you on Veteran. In Far Cry 2, snipers take pot shots at you when you’re a kilometer away and sliding through bushes. Impossible, immersion-breaking stuff that you accept simply to prove that you can hack it.
Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising doesn’t need to cheat to make itself hard. I’ll admit that, along with stealth games, tactical shooters aren’t something I can grok. Give me an RPG or an arcade shooter, and I’ll play it on hard without a second thought. Every time I boot up a tactical shooter, it gives me pause. There’s this sickening moment where I have to ask myself, “easy or normal?” Thankfully, Dragon Rising doesn’t have an easy mode. It tells you, right off the bat, that “normal” means you haven’t played the game before. There’s also “experienced” and “hardcore” for the supernatural among us, you gods and goddesses of tactical realism who I utter a quiet prayer to every night before sleep takes me.
My favorite war movies are the ones where the soldiers don’t want to be there. I guess that’s most war movies, actually, except maybe black-and-white WWII movies and this past year’s celebratory Hurt Locker. I love the scenes where a group of soldiers is forging a path through some woods, maybe while snow is falling, only to run into a group of enemy combatants doing the same thing. A moment ago everybody was talking about the girl back home or their high school football them. The reverie interrupted, there’s this moment where everybody fumbles for their guns like children. Then either they shoot each other, if it’s a sad movie, or they end the stand-off with the sharing of cigarettes, if it’s not a sad movie.
That’s how I died for the first time in Dragon Rising. In the first mission you’ve got to blow up a radar emplacement, call in an artillery barrage on a village full of enemies, and then clear a landing zone for your retrieval chopper. The enemies are far away, and your squad picks them off while you learn the somewhat complex controls. Easy-peasy. Instead of taking the immediate escape, I decided to set off in search of secondary objectives. There were some SAM sites along the coast that I could destroy for extra points. I grabbed an empty humvee and set off into the jungle. This is where the problems started.
Driving in Dragon Rising is unbearable. Rocks aren’t rendered particularly well, and they’re everywhere. When you hit one, your vehicle propels itself into a flip. This is all taking place in first person, so you’re disoriented within a few collisions.
My humvee up-ended itself, so my squad and I had to trek a kilometer through the woods to our target. When you run for too long in this game, your heart starts pounding and your breathing becomes heavy. It’s a miracle of sound design. One of my squadmates muttered, “We’re not even supposed to be here.” That’s when, rounding a hill, we ran head-on into an enemy patrol. There was a moment’s pause as we stared at each other. I cursed audibly, then raised my assault rifle to aim at the closest one. He shot first.
In a lot of games, the enemy AI would have been able to see through the bushes that I couldn’t. They’d start shooting before I could detect them, but I’d also be able to take a few hits, my screen would turn red, and I’d duck for cover and regenerate. But Dragon Rising is a realistic game. The enemy couldn’t see me until I could see them. And when they shot, I fell immediately. This is a pretty dramatic way to die in a videogame, outside of a JRPG cutscene I mean.
After reloading the last checkpoint, I was able to sidestep that particular patrol and make my merry way to the SAM emplacement. While assaulting it, I suffered my first non-fatal bullet wound. The effect is powerful: there’s a bit of a visual jarring, the sound of blood pumping, and the appearance of a trauma read-out on the UI. I clicked through the action wheel, which is summoned with the right bumper, to find the command for requesting help from the medic. He patched me up, and I was able to return to the firefight without fear of bleeding out.
While the presentation of personal injury is handled well in Dragon Rising, I can’t say I was pleased with how it looks in third-person. Basically you order the medic over to the injured soldier, then he pulls out a syringe and pokes it into thin air for a few seconds. I’d been hoping that this would be the game that would make battle wounds look as horrible as they must in real life. Far Cry 2 and Alone in the Dark attempted it, but I really wanted to see some screaming and some blood-spurting. Most of the time, your squadmates don’t even make a peep when they get shot. You just see the color of their icon on your UI turn yellow, orange, or red.
Another somewhat disappointing feature is how crouching and lying prone are implemented. Going into either of these positions yourself will increase your accuracy. But when an enemy does the same, they just become ridiculously hard to hit. I understand that it’s hard to hit somebody who’s lying on the ground, but the algorithm used here just makes the effort into a farce. Even lying prone with a sniper rifle, you won’t be able to hit the guy. What’s worse is that your squadmates actually can hit him simply by spamming suppressing fire.
Usually, I stop playing tactical shooters because I get tired of ordering my squad around. I hate that little cursor that pops up when you want to align your team around the corner of a building. Dragon Rising avoids this problem by ditching the “cramped Middle Eastern cityscape” cliche altogether. You’re fighting a land war on a Pacific Island. It’s brutal, but at least you don’t have to micromanage. I was able to make it rather far only using suppressing fire and the strafe command.
The gear selection and inventory management is handled well. You get tons of ammo, two small arms (rifle or launcher), a pistol, some explosives, and a first-aid kit; re-stocking opportunities abound, as village crates and fallen enemies are ripe with gear. Usually I don’t notice the soundtrack in shooting games, but there are a few Japanese vocal tracks on here that will make you want to spend extended periods of time clicking through the game’s menu. The story is... well, it’s hard to judge a story like this a few weeks after playing through Modern Warfare 2. While the intro cutscene rolled, a kind of slick Flash animation explaining the tumultuous history of an oil-rich island and China’s struggle to liberate it from Russia, I was kind of hoping against hope that it was the set-up for a diplomacy game.
It’s not as bombastic as a typical mainstream shooter narrative can be, but it’s also not nearly as compelling. I don’t feel like I know who my troopers are at all, which is probably a good thing considering how quickly they can die. Do you like tactical shooters? Well, you owe it to yourself to play one without the Tom Clancy name attached to it. If you, like me, are the wrong person for this kind of a game, I recommend sticking to one where the AI has to cheat to beat you.
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Playthrough: Played singleplayer for eight hours, not nearly finished with the campaign.
Disclosure: Review copy of retail disc provided for review by Codemasters.
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