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Introduction

Since I first learned about Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis, I had followed developments of the game almost religiously. That was four to five months ago. I remember when the first single player demo came out, I went into work a few hours late, thank goodness for flextime! Anyhow, fast forward to today and Operation Flashpoint is at revision 1.20 or 1.27 beta. So what sets this game apart from the hundreds of first-person shooters out there you ask? I was never a huge fan of the senseless kill everything that moves and take their armour school of thought but there really wasn’t much else out there. Bohemia Interactive Studios set out to create the most realistic infantry simulation while still keeping it fun enough to play. In OFP there is no armour to deplete, or rocket jumps, half the time you get your head shot off from the enemy you didn’t even see.

To keep it short, it’s about a hypothetical situation in 1985 where Soviet resistance groups are opposing Gorbachev’s new policies, and take over an island where NATO forces are stationed. So you begin as a soldier for the Americans against the Soviet forces.

Operation Flashpoint brings to the table a few things that we haven’t seen before in a tactical sim. First of all, the maps are enormous. Driving from one side of an island to the other would take a long, long time. Another feature I haven’t seen before is driving or flying vehicles and on top of that, allowing another person in a multiplayer game to be in the same vehicle as a passenger, gunner, or commander. You can drive or fly a variety of vehicles ranging from jeeps, tanks, helos, and even planes. Both these features allow you to be quite creative with your approach to a situation. To add life to the game BIS has also included a Mission Editor. This feature alone adds so much more to the game.

Impressions

The graphics in OFP are pretty good considering the size of the maps and the open environment. However, colours are quite bland and everything overall looks very bleak. In the game’s defence, it’s a war-torn battlefield and not a space station with tropical fruit flavoured walls to show off the latest graphics cards. But if you want to play this game in full detail, you’ll need a pretty powerful machine. I run a P3-800Mhz, 386MB RAM, and a 3dfx Voodoo5 video card, pretty outdated stuff. The game runs nicely at 1024x768, but I turn off all shadows to speed things up. The game does support T & L so it should look pretty nice on a Geforce card. In levels with lots of soldiers the game starts to beg for more power, especially when I’m zoomed in with a sniper rifle. My only real complaint with the graphics is the way light sources are seen through almost all objects and how vegetation looks very two dimensional. If you crank up one of the detail settings it looks a lot better but my computer can’t handle it too well. I’d also like to see bodies being blown up, not just charred when hit by anything explosive. As far as sound goes, it’s pretty hard to beat. BIS has put in Doppler effect into moving objects, surround sound, and EAX. When you hear an explosion or a tank rattling by, you can definitely hear where it’s coming from, and it’s a very vital part of the gameplay. The only complaint with the sound is the radio voice seems a little harsh, but it’s such a minor point.

The controls in OFP are like most first-person shooters, mouse for looking and keyboard for movement. However, BIS uses a very intuitive menu system for actions. If you push the keyboard enter or the middle mouse button, an orange menu pops up in the bottom right corner. You can scroll through the menu with your mouse scroller and then select your action with the middle mouse button. If you’re near a vehicle, you can jump in as a driver or get in the back. IF you’re near an ammo crate or a dead body, you have the option of picking up items, you get the idea. Driving vehicles is quite straightforward, obviously the physics model for vehicles is quite dumbed down since such activities could be another game in itself. When firing a weapon, it’s almost impossible to really aim unless you’re looking through the gun’s sights. Running and shooting isn’t possible in this game, well actually it is, it’s just that your aim goes all over the place. After looking through the sites of a weapon for aiming, it’s very difficult to go to another tactical shooter like Rogue Spear where all you see is a target sight. Another thing BIS put in, is the mouselook movement. Unlike most other FPS’s your mouselook doesn’t actually move until you move your target outside of a centre area. BIS’s reason for this is that you can point your gun in different directions but still be facing the same direction. Unfortunately, there are too many realistic details to list in OFP, so let’s move onto something else.