• Summary

• Reviews

• News
• Images
• Videos
• Downloads
• Hints & Cheats

Genre: First-Person Action Publisher: Codemasters Developer: Codemasters Players: 1-8

By Keith B (26th Oct 2009)

For all the virtual bullets people have fired while playing video games, not a lot of them have come with any sort of sensation of realism attached. Don’t get me wrong, games like Modern Warfare were closer to the mark than some, but features like regenerating health and being able to take a smattering of rounds before dying – never mind the Perks system - means that although gritty, it’s certainly not realistic. In 2001 Bohemia Interactive Studios released Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis and despite being riddled with bugs, it garnered a considerable following because of the ultra realism of its content. Playing co-op meant exactly that – you had to work as a team to survive, and even with tight tactics, it often became a circle of trying a method, failing, and restarting.

Codemasters has its name stamped over the box now, and they’re a strong enough publisher and developer that fans of the old had a right to have high hopes for the 2009 instalment, Dragon Rising. Dropping you onto the fictitious island of Skira, your aim is to help the Russians liberate the island from the Chinese, who have traded ownership through conflict with Japan and Russia since WWII in the pursuit of oil supplies.

The island is massive, and entirely open for you to roam at your leisure should you happen to have plenty of hours on your side. The idea being, as with Cold War Crisis, that you can approach objectives from any angle you like, using terrain and cover as your tools. That’s the premise, although the campaign never really unfolds in that manner.

You’re dropped into combat for each mission with a squad of three other soldiers, all reasonably competent, and it’s up to you to give them specific instruction. This is handled with a very effective circle that pops up when you hit RB. From here you can give them specific movement orders, combat parameters, formation information and a range of other options. It works very well and your squad reacts with precision, for the most part.

Assaulting an island is no mean feat, so working your way through the 11 campaign missions will involve all manner of tasks – eliminate armour in a village, drop airstrikes on mortar positions, monitor a target as they roam the landscape, among others. You’ll also work through day and night, so getting to grips with night-vision and the infra red scopes on certain weapons is a must.



Once the bullets start to fly, it’s not uncommon for all your plans to unravel fast. All your approach plans for infiltrating a town become redundant when an unannounced piece of armour rolls out from behind a building, so being able to adjust with haste and get the orders flying is one of the most important skills to learn.

Realism is nothing if it’s not applied to combat, and by God the game is unforgiving. There is no Easy setting here, with Normal being the basic and the two levels above simply removing visual aids, not increasing the skills of the enemy AI. This means that even on Normal difficulty you’re going to get killed, lots and lots and lots.

The problems that many fans feared would hang onto the brand name do appear here. For the vast majority of the time, you’ll never be in close combat with the enemy. Most of your firing will be done from 200 metres or more, with your weapon on single shot, pinging away at an enemy that can’t even see you. The game’s bumph tell us that the AI reacts and so forth (it also tell us that the US Marines were consulted, and I can believe that because of authenticity the radio communications between the squad and the CO), but all I ever saw on my play through to completion was the exact same procedure – you fire and clip an enemy, they drop to the ground and try and scamper away, you shoot them three or four more times and they’re toast. Rinse and repeat. You rarely see a patrol zipping around in a jeep for you to commandeer, and if you do find yourself up close with an enemy, most often their hip shot accuracy is so high that you’ll end up with a bullet in your face before you’ve even managed to squeeze off a round.



For all the good work done on the order wheel method of instruction, it’s incredibly frustrating to catch a bullet, lie bleeding out, and then call your medic only for him to stand 10 metres away looking at a wall. Equally so when you’re looking at a squad mate who’s incapacitated, and your medic simply refuses to do what he’s told, despite calling out that he will. This is where the problems with Dragon Rising start to emerge.

The game is so plagued with inconsistencies that it boggles the mind. Let me list a couple that I found while playing for a period of 15 minutes:

1) When you repair a vehicle, there is no animation to show you’re doing it, so you’re still holding your assault rifle, unmoving, while you fix the bullet holes in a jeep’s engine

2) While watching the VIP and his entourage from a distance, the icon representing which character he was switched between enemies. Lucky I didn’t have a sniper round whistling through the air when it happened

3) Voices often don’t load, and on other occasions the same dialogue plays twice



Beyond those, there are gameplay issues that constantly keep the enjoyment down. For a title that professes its open world and the ability to approach from any angle, it never delivers in the campaign mode. On an early mission as I scuttled along the ground, one of my own US helicopters decided to land. As it wasn’t moving, I ran a great distance to get to it, sensing the chance to really approach the mission differently, namely by blasting the outpost to smithereens from 800 metres in the air. But when I got to it, I couldn’t enter. For no reason. And so the chopper sat in a field with its gunner shooting at trees while I ran back to my squad and on with the mission. That’s not limited to one instance either – you can’t enter vehicles not designated to you by the developers until they say so.

The checkpoint system is often questionable. In some instances the checkpoint will leave you a good 10 minute run to your next objective, in other cases it leaves you around the corner, literally, from a squad of enemy special forces. It can often happen that you’ll progress into a mission, hit a checkpoint and then be told you need anti-armour weaponry, and if you didn’t pick it up in the first house you passed, then you have to restart.



Thankfully, multiplayer is solid and removes plenty of the AI issues. There are three game modes available and all have maps available other than the campaign, meaning the Infiltration maps, where one team must enter a base while the other team defends it, are suited to this purpose, while deathmatch maps are open and frantic. Beyond the rudimentary features, the individual maps are structured to allow different style of fighting, with some ranged, and others up closer.

So while the campaign may suit co-op a hell of a lot better than on your own, I admittedly still found myself enjoying the experience. Playing with friends will certainly provide plenty of game time for those who prefer their realistic combat simulators and the online multiplayer delivers something akin to ArmA on PC (which is the spiritual successor to Cold War Crisis, being developed by Bohemia Interactive), with the realism right up there and vehicular combat takes on a whole new meaning when the damage they can inflict can be so deadly. There’s not a lot to it, it’s bent and warped with problems, but at its heart lies something that those committed to the game will love.

Share On: