Operation Flashpoint:
Dragon Rising

We like to think of it as tough love. Spend ages sprinting across a field toward the enemy emplacement…only to get a bullet planted deep in your melon when you’re still 200 yards away. Anyone who opts to “go Rambo” and charges up to opponents is in for a very speedy lesson in Operation Flashpoint.

Welcome to a world where every bullet is potentially lethal, every enemy is unpredictable, and attempting to tea-bag someone will just get an embarrassing Polaroid stapled to your coroner’s report. Once you get used to scanning the horizon for hostiles and taking out threats at an average range of 150 yards, though, it all suddenly clicks and you become just as dangerous, if not more so.

Intriguingly, Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising doesn’t have levels; it has AOs, each a vast “area of operation” that offers you (and up to three co-op buddies) the chance to express yourself tactically in a way that no other shooter on Xbox 360 quite manages. Faced with insurmountable odds during a frontal assault? You always have the space, if not necessarily the time, to stage a side-on or rear attack. When you fail a mission and end up face-down in the dirt, you don’t just try again; you take a moment to adjust the plan. So while Call of Duty and the like aim for Hollywood-inspired set-pieces, Operation Flashpoint actually feels like being a soldier…at least as far as our sorry magazine-editor asses can tell.

On top of that feat of magic, we were also impressed by the vastness and remarkable atmosphere of the island on which the game takes place. While Codies’ Ego engine can’t replicate Dirt 2 levels of fidelity, you’ll still find breathtaking valleys, dense forests, and thick grassland as you progress through the game. The environment is also one of the thousands of variables that Operation Flashpoint throws at you during a firefight. Finding cover can be extremely tough, and vegetation often obscures your vision if you clatter to a prone position to avoid enemy fire. Then there’s the sheer range involved in a battlefield this big — bullets don’t travel in a straight line over hundreds of yards, so you have to account for the dropoff.

12NEXT