Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising

The difficulty of a game can normally be expressed in general terms. It’s hard or easy. Hardcore or casual. Frustrating or relaxing. Communicating the sheer barrage of difficulty rained down upon you by Dragon Rising, however, is going to be almost as hard as the game itself. Because while it is certainly one of, if not the toughest military FPSs we’ve ever played, for an equal number of reasons we might condemn we also have to commend. Explaining exactly why you may or may not like it isn’t going to be a problem. Scoring it, on the other hand, is. Right now we’re rewriting this very text just for the sake of a few comparatively stress-free moments of not having to think about the score.

Let’s start with the bad. The learning curve in Dragon Rising is not so much a curve at all. More a buttered half-pipe. During an earthquake. Dying repeatedly and picking away at the game’s entirely over-facing control system is the only way you’ll ever really learn how to play. The on-screen tooltips that pop up are useful, but so frequent at the outset that we challenge any elephant to recall the majority.

Practically every button on your control pad opens a menu of some kind, from ammo type and frequency to orders, artillery requests, equipment changes and so on. It’s all just so wretchedly complicated, and as such has its PC origins cauterised into its very being. One radial menu after the other attempts to make up for the fact that, for example, on a keyboard you could feasibly press Ctrl-M to call for a medic, which makes some kind of logical, not to mention memorable sense.

But – and it’s a big but – once over the hump, Dragon Rising is one of the most engrossing and rewarding military simulators we have ever played. No matter how much we wanted to hold a grudge against it for putting us through three hours of repetitive, frustrating death, often from a single bullet, once we’d memorised much of the menu navigation and formulated some decent tactics, we were totally, irrevocably hooked. What we need to get across to you is that this is by no means for everyone. We’re actually hugely impressed that Codemasters stuck to its simulated guns and didn’t compromise one little bit.