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Ambition can be a dangerous thing in games development. Just look at Daikatana. Had they reduced the excessive number of weapons and monsters they might have had time to focus more on the little things like, oh, office doors that don't squish you and "friends" that don't shoot you in the back (or get crushed by office doors for that matter) and it subsequently might have been a decent game. Well, maybe that's still stretching it; this is Daikatana we're talking about after all. But anyway, onto the point of this introductory ramble. Operation Flashpoint is nothing if not ambitious, aiming to simulate a hefty chunk of modern warfare. You have infantry, tanks, helicopters, trucks, jeeps the only things the game doesn't include are fighter jets, naval vessels and, well, nukes, and those exclusions are pretty understandable ones. Question is, did they go too far with ambition and lose sight of good game design?
Those of you unfamiliar with Operation Flashpoint are probably currently thinking "Right, so it's a gulf-war type RTS without many units". Wrong. Very, very wrong. Operation Flashpoint is played from a first or third person perspective and it drops you right in the middle of a could-have-been Russia versus America conflict (well, splinter Russian forces versus NATO more precisely) that takes place in 1985 across a few massive islands each a few square miles in size.
It's not just the scope of the game that's impressive, there are countless little details that you'll encounter across the single campaign. For one, when developers Bohemia Interactive went for realism, they didn't just opt to have real life guns in the game. Take, for example, the Russian Dragunov sniper rifle. It doesn't just have a single crosshair, it has a complex, realistic range finding diagram printed onto the scope lens as you can see in the first shot on the left. Also, tanks work just like in real-life. You have a tank commander who calls the shots and give directions, the gunner gets the task of reloading shells and firing the cannon and the driver, well, I'm sure you can work out what he does. Controlling everything can be a bit daunting at first, especially if you're commanding a tank. Whoever came up with the bright idea of using one button for the tank commander to both tell the driver where to go and to tell the gunner where to fire really needs a lesson in interface design. Pressing the left mouse button will only fire if you've targeted something with the "V" key, but in the heat of battle working out if, with your next mouse button click, you're about to blow the enemy tank away or commit the insane act of broad siding him is not always easy.
Even controlling a ground trooper can be a little strange as the developers decided to add a crosshair deadzone to the game. What this means is, unlike in Quake, Unreal and the like, moving the mouse only moves your view if your crosshair moves outside an invisible box, the deadzone, situated in the centre of the screen. While this is more realistic (how many times have you seen a soldier in a war film move his head to constantly keep it in line with his gun) I just couldn't fully get used to it despite countless hours of playing the game. Still, the fact that I did none the less manage to play and enjoy those countless hours of gameplay indicates that it wasn't exactly a major pain, more of a minor irritation that I could do without.
So what were those countless hours spent doing? Mostly trying not to get shot. Even more so than in other realistic combat games like Rainbow Six and Delta Force you feel very, very vulnerable in Operation Flashpoint, just as I'm sure you do in real life warfare. You get to realise just how damn effective camouflage is when you get shot by a man that, a few seconds ago, looked very much like an innocuous shrub. The zoom on all guns but the sniper rifles is pretty weak, forcing you to get close enough to the enemy to be able to hit them without getting shot on the way. Even sitting in a tank you can't help but feel a little nervous since, while you're a very well armoured target, you're also a particularly obvious one that might as well have "Missile Fodder" painted on the side. Attack Helicopters are probably the most powerful unit in the game, highly effective against both enemy infantry and tanks, but sadly they're a little tricky to fly. None of the various control issues are exactly heinous crimes against gamers everywhere, but had a little more time and though gone into them it would have made a very good game even more enjoyable.
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