PS3 Review – Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising
Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising, developed by Codemasters, is a tactical first person shooter that aims to show the user a very realistic experience. But in a market already saturated with shooters, is this title worth a look?
The game places you on the island of Skira after talks have broken down between Russia and China over an oil reservoir and the U.S. intervenes to help out Russia. The game features many missions and secondary missions that are presented to you as you progress through the story. Throughout the game, all parts of the island are eventually used at some point. Though it is not completely open world, it is separated into different sections.
This isn’t to say that the sections are small. The map is actually a bit overwhelming at first, especially considering it is a first person shooter. There are many different courses of action when attempting to complete a mission. Some of these include running in and shooting, sniping, and sending your squadmates in to handle the dirty work. The options are all there; it’s up to you how you want to play.
The game is probably one of the most realistic titles ever released. This level of realism will actually turn off a lot of people. The game features one-hit kills, for example, though they are rare. Additionally, while running for prolonged periods of times, your heart rate will begin to rise, and the controller will begin vibrating with the pulses. As you run for longer periods of time, your heart rate will increase, thus resulting in a quicker vibration from the Dualshock 3. Eventually, you will reach a point where you are so tired, you will have to slow down to a jog as your heart rate returns to normal.
If you are hurt, you can’t simply wait for your health to go back up. A field dressing must be applied to the wounds that have been inflicted, or your character will bleed to death. The severity of the injury dictates how fast your character will die when injured. Injuries are indicated by a color coded outline of a human body on the top of the screen.
The game’s realism also extends to the weapons, in which actual ballistic systems have been implemented, so the weapons behave as they would in real life. This may not seem like a big deal, but it’s all these little things that make this game feel so realistic.
One thing to take note of, though, is that as the difficulty is turned up, all the little hints and help disappear off the screen, and there is no enemy radar screen to help. You must hide and look for things such as movement in the dirt to track your enemies. Ammo and health are taken off the screen as well, forcing you to keep track of them yourself.
The controls are pretty good in Operation Flashpoint. There is no sluggishness or delayed response, but they do take some getting used to for those of us used to the Call of Duty series, since they are a bit different. However, considering the game takes a more tactical approach, the controls become second nature once you adapt to them.
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11 Responses to “PS3 Review – Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising”
this is more realistic than American Army?
It must be noted that the difficulty in this game is BRUTAL no matter which difficulty you choose in the beginning. If you enjoy Demon Soul’s BRUTAL, and you enjoy shooters, then you should have a blast with this.
I’m very intrigued now, so is this title really worth the purchase? I love realism & a good challenge
Had this, found it pretty intense at times but in the end it was too hardcore for its own good, theres stages where you just have to do things in a fixed way in order to progress, you’d find that you’d have to start the whole mission again from scratch if you made a wrong judgement during the mission which is extremely frustrating. Also, most missions are timed so you gotta keep moving – this is pretty hardcore as it gets, if you’re up for the challenge go for it, if not, well you’ve been warned! Def worth a rental first given the chance!
~funkyellowmonkey(ps3 id)~
Even though I don’t usually care for war shooters, I’m kind of interested in this one because of the whole realism aspect. I don’t care much for commanding a squad though, that stuff never seems to work very well. But at least it’s not a silly arcade shooter like all the rest.
@matthew
I won’t be getting this then also you might not come back but matt i would recommend you don’t put details such as your name and surname onto the internet as certain people can use this information to gain stuff like your bank details it’s one of the reasons people have usernames.
@Timewarp
You know he’s not the only Matthew Whitney in the world. Such a comment shows how paranoid you are of the Internet
Xael – he may be paranoid but sometimes that’s better than the alternative. I know it seems silly in this day and age though…I still have a hard time convincing my parents that it’s safe to send personal information over the internet (to secure sites of course). Is there a risk?? Yes, but since every company keeps all of their account holders info. on a computer somewhere anyway there is almost as much of a risk of info. being stolen if you don’t personally send it.
Anyway, this review has convinced me that I’ll at least have to give this game a try. Maybe it will be too difficult but I like the sound of realism.
@giese
It’s silly anywhere, anytime. It’s understandable your parents are cautious, they didn’t grow up with internet. How is knowing my full name going to net somebody my bank account info? If there’s someone that can(who would peruse psls for identity theft opportunities?) hack into your bank account info from JUST your name, you probably aren’t safe posting anywhere for any reason.
I do agree that the review convinced me to try this out though lol, I don’t even particularly like squad shooters, but the realism sounds really interesting.
Good review a 4 out of 5 hmm I may have to rent this one.
You know what guys, imo i wouldn’t characterize this game as ‘hard’. Using that adj. makes you think that its difficultly lies in its enemy ai or the mission objectives. When, like i said, imo the difficulty is in the mechanics and the gameplay. While you will, or at least should, get fast at issuing orders often its never fast enough and you lose your ability to ‘fight’ b/c of the on;screen prompts. Another gameplay mechanic that can become incredibly frustrating is the weapon selection menu and even more so, the actual readying of a weapon. Missile or rocket launchers are always reloaded whenever they are brought out- even if you just loaded it, put it away for 1 sec and then brought it back out. And I’m not even gonna tell you how much the game world’s sense of realism affected the reloading time for these weapons. I coulda cooked a omlette, come back and still have been reloading. That being said, the game does have an incredible sense of emersion and tension. You really want to complete the missions as best outlined by your commanders and that lends the game a real air of authenticity that you just can’t find often in a console shooter. That and 19 silver trophies + 5gold can either just barely or not quite overcome those glaring mechanics that kept this game from being perfect.