Operation Flashpoint: Red River

I bought this game and it arrived today, I'm expecting it to be rubbish, but I'm going to by playing through it co-op so it should be fun regardless. I won't be playing until Saturday so I'll give my impressions then.

Well played it tonight, wasn't a good start, we spent about 45 minutes trying to make a party. Neither of us could join the others party, kept saying failed to connect. On gamefaqs there's a post that says it's something to do with ports, I don't know if thats correct but after playing in someone else's game we were able to make a game with just us.

We played on Hardcore mode which is what we used to play on the last Operation Flashpoint game, it's not actually harder, you have the same health and the AI is the same it just removes nearly all of your HUD and other help. But in this game while I think it's mostly the same you don't have names over your characters, so while playing co-op I had no idea which soldier my friend was, so we got divided easy.

The campaign, we were surviving on this, I'll tell the truth most of the killing was done by my friend I don't get that many kills on this game, I act more as a bullet sponge. Anyway we cleared out some enemies and I was doing a little bit of looking around and suddenly died, there was no explosion no bullet fire, I wondered if I had walked out of the battle field so my friend went to where I died and yeah he died too. There is next to no warning when you are leaving the battle field, your screen gets a little pixelated distortion, but I didn't notice it at all, I was running, walking you notice it a bit but still not much. That was a really stupid thing to add to the game, I didn't even go that far from where we started.

You can only play against AI online, there's no mode which is vs players. The last game had that option and it was good but for god knows what reason they thought it was a good idea to not let players fight each other online. They claim it's something to do with encouraging team work, that we are all on the same side, and that they don't want to be like CoD etc.

When I'm actually playing the game it's alright the gameplay is fine and playing co-op with a friend is fun (When you can connect to them) I wouldn't recommend this game unless you are going to play with someone. Operation Flashpoint may lie to you but it is quite good. This game has been made like CoD, the missions aren't the same as they used to be. I have serious doubts that I will play another Operation Flashpoint game again.

Load of shite... Tried to do the first mission again first try today my friend got ran over he says he was 5 metres away from the car. We restarted and we got further, there was a fire fight over a river, my friend said he had to go in 5 minutes so we said ok lets rambo this mission and we ran over the bridge towards the enemy. My friend said no don't run over the bridge but it was too late I insta-died again, it seems we aren't allowed to go towards the enemy!

The last game wasn't great but at least you could approach it however you liked, infact compaired to this game the last one was amazingly good. The slight trouble we had with it's online mode was nothing compaired to this one and while the last game didn't let you go from one side of the island to the other if you wanted at least it let you go more than a few metre's from where the game wants you to be. You could run for about 30 minutes if you wanted, taking a really long route to the enemy, and if you did get to the edge of the area it wanted you to stay in it gave you a decent warning I think it was something like "You are leaving the battle field".

I have to say I am beginning to hate this game. We've played for a few hours now and we haven't finished the tutorial/first mission, and the game isn't hard.

Ok we finally completed the tutorial barely, I had green flashes in front of my eyes a few times (The enemy use green tracers on their bullets). I suggested if we failed again we should just do it solo and then continue coop in mission 2, thankfully we didn't have to do that because I suck at this game and like I said most of the killing is done by my friend who loves guns and shite.

The second mission isn't as bad, we had no idea what we were doing, which was our fault as we didn't look at the objectives or listen to the guy giving us orders and our squad was with other squads they kept telling the different squads what to do but we didn't know which squad we were in. We also screwed up the mission when my friend nearly got run over, I just managed to tell him to get off the road, sadly we still failed as he got kicked from the game.

Also in the second mission we didn't find any walls of death, but I was afraid the whole game of running into one. I'm hoping the death wall was just in the tutorial I would be quite mad if I got near to the end of a long hard mission and happened to run into one.

Yesterday I was going to play online with a friend, we have to join someone else game before we can play with each other for some reason so I went to the list of active games and there were only 4 games, only 4 games, granted this was at the lowest point of the day for people playing but for a game thats been out for less than a month I think, thats bad. I think at the peak there are no more than 10-15 games. There's a detailed search engine to pick out games from the list but you really don't need it, infact using the search feature takes a lot longer than just browsing all, because 90% of the time it will come up with no results.

I've had some fun playing it so I don't regret buying it and I'll for certain continue playing it, but only because I'm playing coop and that makes it fun.

I think a lot of it's down fall is due to no competitive game modes, it's all you vs AI. The game isn't easy not by a long shot because you are flooded with enemies at least in the fire missions, the campaign isn't so bad, though we had a rough time with it yesterday, I was the only survivor on our team, which is bad because I spent most of the mission going the wrong way. Lucky for us my friend died just before the end and all I had to do was get in the car.

The developers need to stop being idiots, in the last game there were lies and major parts of the game unfinished (You were supposed to be able to customize your soldiers load out before missions, things were set up for that in the game but you could access it, I believe actually said customize your load out but clicking on stuff did nothing). In this game things like online are broken, the missions are more linear, (In the last game you had objectives but it was upto you to decide how to go about them, the only time you didn't have much choice was when there was a time limit for example before all the tanks get blown up, you would have to take out the mortars) this time they have gone for more of a storyline, there is a kind of cool cutscene at the beginning of the mission, but in mission you get the guy from the trailers just talking at you most of the time I don't listen to a word he's saying and you have really, really long sections of the game where you are just riding in the back of a vechicle and all there is to do is look around while you are being talked at for ages. Thankfully though the kill walls haven't shown up again yet.

Nothing about the missions in this game is good, we don't need a damn storyline, what was good about the last game was that you did feel like a soldier, I think the lack of story was what made it feel like that, you just had objectives and a general reason for being there, nothing else was important.