Company / Developers – Codemasters / Bohemia Interactive Homepage Genre – First Person Shooter / Conflict Simulation
Introduction
For you people who were living in a cave last year, Operation Flashpoint was a PC game that was very popular and became a very big title for 2001. When you look at the box the first thing you say is “It’s a first person shooter”, well that’s true, but it’s unlike your normal shooters such Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament as it has one important difference, it strives for realism.
Now this may put a lot of you off. The thought of dying when one bullet strays to close to your head may be unbearable for the common deathmatcher, but it is this realism that sets it apart from other games. For if you were really going to define this game you wouldn’t really class it under the FPS flag, but more under the ‘Conflict Simulation’ banner. Something which I have never before enjoyed, and usually do not touch even with a 30 inch stick!
So if you wanted to be cruel you would stick this game in a similar category to the likes of Delta Force and Rainbow Six. But being fair to OPF even it is not THAT similar to those games. For OPF happily sits in the middle of the two genres, taking the best features of each, and losing some of their more unattractive qualities in the process. And to be honest, it pulls it off nicely!
Compatibility
On my older machine, which was a Pentium II 300 with 16MB Voodoo 3, the game did run. It may have had all the fancy settings off, and played in 800x600 but the game still ran amicably. However, this was in the early missions, and when things get hectic, which they do, even my present system can go into the shakes!
However one problem did exist that I noticed (although I think a subsequent patch has fixed it now). You see when playing in Direct3D mode, the only option for a card that doesn’t support Glide, shadows and some textures became highly corrupted. This problem when I first got the game drove me nuts, because it looked so awful! I finally turned off the cool shadows effects because it was that irritating. Also playing in 16bit colour makes some textures quite laughable (for instance sometimes part of a soldiers head would become visible, even though he was wearing a hat!). So if you can play in 32bit colour, like I do now, do so.
