Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis is a realistic first-person shooter combat simulator.  Rule the battlefield using a wide array of tanks, choppers, vehicles and of course, kickass weaponry.  Now, I’ve never heard of “Bohemia Interactive”, a Czech-based company, and thus I didn’t know exactly what to expect from the game.  Turns out, the Czechs know how to make one hell of a game - I played and continue to play this game to this day.  The premise?  The game takes place during the cold war.  NATO troops are called to duty as invading Soviets, led by General Guba, upset world peace by attempting to expand their Soviet influence through and over the politically-independent free nations of Everon and nearby islands off the coast of Russia.  NATO troops are sent to Everon to see what’s up, and to halt a possible offensive of Guba and his troops as they try to expand stupid Communism and their evil ways.  You, as a NATO soldier, will climb the ranks and command your squad to kick Soviet ass the hell out of Everon and back into their shitty toilet of a country.   

The Review

Gameplay and Features:  You can choose from a variety of game types, including Campaign, Single Mission, Multiplayer, and a comprehensive level editing tool.  The Campaign will take you through a shitload of missions.  A very intuitive feature of the campaign, which sets it apart from other games of its type, is that your actions throughout the campaign result in a variety of different outcomes.  What I mean by that is you are given a bunch of paths to take – at times, you will be unaware of this – which yield different missions and basically a different game.  Kind of like real life though, right?  Here’s a good way to put it:  the Operation Flashpoint campaign is completely non-linear.  Cutscenes with English and spoken Russian add to the experience (think Return to Castle Wolfenstein, where the Germans actually speak German!).  Your mission objectives are also explained in the cutscenes, as well as material crucial to plot development.

There are a bunch of single missions you can choose from to screw around in or sharpen your skills.  Some involve commanding a platoon of Abrams tanks to attack a position miles away (the time accelerator is handy in this case) or to simply fly a helicopter and attack an advancing convoy.  There are covert missions, too – those are cool.  You gotta play smart, and stay in the shadows.  The enemy is much less able to spot you in bushes, under trees, and in the dark.

The Multiplayer is pretty fun, despite having horrible netcode.  I play my brother on our LAN with pings of like 10 in the game, and player/vehicle movement anomalies like shaking or stuttering aggravate the overall enjoyment of the game.  Below is an example of Flashpoint’s weird behavior in multiplayer.  Sure as hell seems like our pings are more like 400 instead of 10.  Oh well.

Sure as hell seems like our pings are more like 400 instead of 10.  Oh well.  Tiny and I used to play Operation Flashpoint multiplayer a lot.  TK’ing was great.  I shot my dumb teammate in the face just for fun.  A cool feature in flashpoint is that you can replace your standard face.bmp image with one of your choice.  That’s my face on the left; Tiny is the driver to the right.  Look at our bloody arms.   

I’ll warn you ahead of time – it’s not as easy as it looks.  Bohemia Interactive probably didn’t have enough time to make the create-a-face feature friendlier in implementation.  You have to line up your face perfectly with the face model’s geometry with 3^rd party software.  Not easy, especially when you don’t have a professional image editing program like Adobe Photoshop.

The level editing tool is atrocious.  The idea sounds great, but it’s just impossible to use.  Setting up a bunch of tanks and harmless civilians to run over is simple, but if you want to make missions with specific events occurring at x and at time y, you need to use scripting commands.  Too complicated.  I wanted to make a multiplayer scenario with respawning soldiers.  Technically, it’s do-able, but who wants to type in like three lines of alien code in god knows where?  Besides, I tried it and it didn’t work, so I gave up. 

I don’t want to make this review exceptionally long, and I want to write about other stuff.  Commanding your squad is a burden at first, but I imagine you get used to it just as you do any other thing in this world.  The function keys on top of your keyboard are assigned to your soldiers (you can command 11 soldiers max.).  You can control your soldier(s) like robots – go there, do this, lay down, get in that truck, stay low, watch 9 o’clock, etc. etc.  It’s nice to have all those options, but it is hard to go through the expansive action menus in the midst of a battle.

I didn’t know Russians were so dedicated.  He got shot in the head and in the face, and yet he is still able to put that fact aside for a moment and pursue the enemy.

There are a ton of tanks, choppers, cars, and guns belonging to the East, West, and Resistance forces.  Civilians get stuff too.  Part of the enjoyment/fun of the game is playing around with various guns, tanks, trucks, and aircraft by yourself.  I shouldn’t have to spoil the fun by showing pictures of them, and just listing names wastes my time and bores you.  But I can say that the vehicles and tanks are great fun, and that the freedom is immense.  Especially since the four islands in the game (Everon, Desert, Malden, and Kolgujev) are of the largest I’ve ever seen in a game.

Graphics:  The graphics, I think, are great.  Particle effects are realistic and some vehicle models have immense polygon counts.  Textures are sharp, and the faces are adequately detailed.  T&L (transform and lighting) is utilized and is particularly evident in Flashpoint’s rendering of shadows and lights.  It is quite a sight to see a soldier light up appropriately under the headlights of a car; it is very realistic.  The ground and environment textures are poor, however, and mountainous areas could use some smoothing with more polys.  With max settings, the game runs pretty well at about 30 FPS on average, which is fine for this game.  I have a 64MB Geforce 2 Pro, 1333MHz Athlon CPU and 384MB RAM.

Sound:  Nothing spectacular.  For some reason, when you’re inside a vehicle, the initial loudness of the engine becomes so faint it’s ridiculous.  I don’t understand why the developers implemented this “feature”.  Sound, annoying or not, should be genuine.  A tank shouldn’t be quieter than the whine of my computer fans, which are pretty quiet anyway.  And I was hoping the machineguns would have a little more oomph in them.  Christ, the M60 sounds like it’s shooting paperclips or something! 

There is a widely-known issue with hardware accelerated sound on Sound Blaster Live! series hardware.  A strange “garble” of sorts distorts the sound at random.  This is fixable by switching views from 3^rd to 1^st person or vice-versa.  Newly released drivers from Creative haven’t solved the problem, nor has the newest version of Flashpoint itself.  If you can’t live with it, disable hardware acceleration.  But I wouldn’t do that.

Pros:  Immersive and challenging campaign, tons of vehicles, tanks, aircraft and weapons each with their own unique abilities, makes you feel like you’re really there, commanding your squad and advancing on the enemy.  Nice shadow rendering.

Cons:  Unfriendly and overly complex mission editor, commanding squad is a burden, buggy sound, only one save per level allowed.

Overall rating:  85%