Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis

Pros • Cold War Commies are the next best wargame villains to Nazis • Massive, realistic outdoor environments with virtually no artificial boundaries • Deeply immersive • All the excitement of being on a front line with none of that icky pain, death, tragedy and horror stuff • Incredible variety of missions, objectives, vehicles and weapons	Cons • Only one game save per mission • Friendly unit AI leaves something to be desired • Some geometry, clipping and camera view problems • Multiplayer not as satisfying as it could be • Control takes some getting used to, especially if you’re a Counter-Strike addict
Bottom Line A realistic, atmospheric and intelligent shooter-meets-military sim that’s as close as you’ll ever want to get to the front line of a ground war. Jacks of all trades are supposed to be masters of none, or so the saying goes. The rules dictate that if you attempt to combine elements of action, strategy and simulation into one game, you’re going to end up with a mutant hydra of a beast that gets nothing right and pisses off fans of all the genres it tried to encompass. Well, somebody should have mentioned that to Czech developer Bohemia Interactive, because they’ve gone and defied the rules with this monumental military action-sim-strategy monster that covers more ground than an Abrams tank at full throttle. While you play mainly as a US Army infantryman in an alternate near-past where the Cold War suddenly got shoved onto the front burner, later missions see you commanding troops, carrying out black ops, driving tanks and even piloting aircraft as part of a story-driven, pseudo-realistic campaign leading towards a final conflict that could decide the fate of the free world. Oh, it’s not going to represent the be-all, end-all of gaming experiences to every player, true enough. Fans of twitchy shooters will find Operation Flashpoint too slow and unwieldy, diehard sim jockeys will find it offensively simplistic and real-time strategy buffs will scoff at the clunky command controls. But for that teeming mass known as the rest of us, war is hell … and Operation Flashpoint is one hell of a game.

I’ve never enjoyed dying in a game as much as I do in Operation Flashpoint. Maybe it’s the fact that death can be as sudden and random as it is in any real war--you spot an enemy soldier a second too late, and your chest is ripped open by a single burst of bullets before you can even raise your weapon. Or maybe it’s the pithy quotes splashed on the screen when you die, famous bon mots and proverbs about meeting the reaper by everyone from George Patton to Albert Einstein to Pink Floyd.

Actually, I think it’s the way the camera pulls back to reveal who or what dealt the fatal blow, then lazily pans around the battlefield as the war continues on without you. Operation Flashpoint isn’t about Private John Rambo, a one-man army taking on those dirty Commies with nothing but twin 50-cals and a sneer. Instead, it’s a rare game that gives you the feeling of being a small cog in a giant war machine. An important cog, for sure, but the world doesn’t end just because you’re not in it anymore. Somehow, that says a lot about how realistic and immersive this game is.

The year is 1985, one Ronnie “the Gipper” Reagan is in the Oval Office, and factions within the Russian government have decided the Cold War could use a little heating up. The Russians have taken over a group of Balkan-like Eastern European islands, and you begin the campaign game as a freshly minted army private who’s never seen combat before, dumped in the middle of the NATO forces preparing to engage the Russkies. Over the course of the campaign you switch between a handful of other characters, though your grunt alter-ego remains the primary eyes through which you experience this war.

Explaining what Operation Flashpoint isn’t is almost easier than describing what it is. It isn’t a run-and-gun shooter like Soldier of Fortune, but neither is it purely a stealthy, tactical, planning-heavy exercise in strategy like Rainbow Six. While you can drive or fly more than 20 different ground and air vehicles, it’s not a tank/chopper/aircraft sim. Occasionally you command a squad of soldiers through a point and click interface, but it’s not a real-time strategy game. And although the weapons, modes of transport and environments are shockingly realistic, it’s not a purely authentic military sim, either… you can easily rack up more kills in one mission than most soldiers would see during an entire tour of duty.

But how much variety can there be in what is, at its core, a military action-shooter? Gee, only as much variety can there be in war, period. Some missions will have you as just another grunt in a squad sweeping into a village to prise it loose from Russian control, taking cover in abandoned houses and chucking grenades at sandbagged machinegun emplacements. Another will task you with laying mines on a country road and ambushing a convoy of Russian tanks with LAWs - and you DON’T want to miss, ’cause if you run out of rockets you’ve pretty much bought yourself a body bag. Or you might be wearing the black uniform of a special ops commando, facing overwhelming odds with nothing but your wits, stealth and a silenced Heckler & Koch submachine gun. Later in the game, you’re under cover as a civilian driving a truck loaded with resistance fighters through Russian-held checkpoints… until your cover is blown, and everything goes to hell in a hot-lead handcart.

And that’s only a sample of what Operation Flashpoint offers across its depth and breadth of missions, including the more than 30 campaign levels and about a dozen surprisingly well-crafted one-offs. Unfortunately, there is a downside to a game of this scope, and that is the difficulty in finding and cleaning up the bizarre little bugs and quirks that snap the immersion like a infantryman’s leg under a tank tread. While the attention to detail goes right down to realistic truck dashboards with working speedometers, climbing into said trucks is a herky jerky exercise that doesn’t even always work ... many times I’d try to board a truck in third person mode and simply pop out the side, just one of several geometry problems that crop up now and again. And the lack of unlimited saves--you get one per mission--is criminal, though it can be worked around by tediously alt-tabbing out of the game and renaming the save file.

But that intangible quality called “gameplay” is all about reaching into a player’s heart and brain and guts to stir up emotions, and Operation Flashpoint has got it in spades. Crouching behind some shrubs as a Russian tank rumbles by, praying that you’re not spotted even as you wait for the concussion of a HEAT shell to blow you into a bloodied rag doll--that’s tension. Laying in the grass on your belly, staring through your M16’s gunsights and carefully squeezing off rounds at an advancing squad of soldiers, unwavering as their own shots whine over your head or thud against the ground next to you--that’s excitement. Sneaking into a Russian encampment at night to plant C4 charges around a fuel depot and then detonating the explosives from the safe vantage of a hilltop--that’s satisfaction. Plucking a dropped rocket launcher off a dead anti-tank soldier and using it to blow the Shilka bearing down on your squad into a smoking piece of scrap--that’s relief. Stealing a T55 tank and running amok in a compound, blasting the crap out of enemy barracks and squishing Russkie soldiers beneath your treads--well, that’s just plain fun.

Of course, the jack-of-all-trades factor does come into play. Fans of hardcore sims like Jane’s Longbow 2 or Steel Beasts will probably find the aircraft and tank control overly simplistic or unrealistic (though to be fair, sacrificing realism for accessibility is not a crime in a game like this), and even I didn’t care for the missions where you’re tasked with commanding your own squad, issuing orders through a combination hotkey menu and point-and-click interface that proves a little awkward. To say nothing of the fact your grunts have the disturbing habit of acting like suicide commandos unless you babysit them carefully.

While the multiplayer mode is well-implemented and fun, it could use some optimizing and ultimately degenerates into your basic fragfest unless you can find like-minded individuals to play as a team. On the flipside, Operation Flashpoint includes a ridiculously easy-to-use level editor, and a thriving mod-making community has already sprung up around the game, thanks in part to its earlier European release.

Very few games are so deserving of having their flaws overlooked as Operation Flashpoint. The attention to detail, the immersion in the game world, the feeling of being plopped in the middle of a larger conflict, doing your part to win the war while keeping your own butt intact … all of it lends to the kind of gaming experience that doesn’t come along very often, and one that’s well worth jumping into with both boot-clad feet. Now if you’ll ’scuse me, it’s time to go win one for the Gipper.

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