Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising is one of those gems that is overlooked by most players. Personally I think the way to get the most out of this game though is running multi-player Co-op.

This is no Call of Duty or Medal of Honor shoot 'em up, but rather a tactical combat simulator. If you are a solo player I would probably skip this title. However if you like to roleplay and really get into your job, then team up with up to three others and run this game in multi-player campaign mode (Co-op).

There are four roles to choose from. Engineer, Medic, Sniper and Squad Leader. There is only one squad leader and he sets up and calls out the waypoints and strategies through the missions. The game can be a bit glitchy at times, but the fun factor far outweighs the technical glitches. The first mission is probably the worst, so if you pick up this game don't let the beginning stop you. By the third mission you will be wading through the foliage calling out targets for your sniper while your engineer sets some demo up on an enemy APC. I cannot emphasize enough that this game is best played with others and is definitely not a solo affair. You will need to use 3rd party software for headset chat. You will need to use a headset as well as the in game communication is very poor.

I always played Squad Leader, as I was the host for our game sessions. One of the most memorable moments in this game for me was when our sniper got pinned down behind a wall and was getting hammered by a .50 cal from an enemy technical. I sent in the engineer with this heavy weapon and before he reached the wall he went down hard. He was still alive so I instructed the medic to lend support to the engineer while I drew fire from the technical. The screaming going on over the headset was intense. The medic got the engineer back on his feet and behind the wall while our sniper bugged out of the area. I was getting attention form that .50 cal and hiding behind a tree and was also drawing fire from some infantry that heard the ruckus and started closing in on my position. Just when I figured that I was going down the technical blew up thanks to our engineer's heavy weapon and the inantry closing in on my position started dropping like flies from our sniper. We were back in business doing what we did best.

When it comes right down to it, it's times like this that I game for. I would highly suggest this title to anyone that likes to game with friends. Operation Flashpoint: Red River is even better and provides a smoother ride. If you can pick this title up on a steam sale with Red River I wouldn't hesitate.

I have owned this game since it was released but just realized I never reviewed it. This is one of those games that suffered from being associated with another company. If this was just called Dragon Rising it would never have suffered the internet hate it did. Alot of the reviews for this game are by people who own ArmA series games from BIS. Which they would NEVER give this gamne a shot. Overall the game play is Spectacular. You have some of the greatest firefights you will ever have playing this game. The movement is fluid. Even for being 8 years old now it STILL plays solid and looks pretty good. The real OFDR community has a TON of addon missions and mods that will have you playing this game forever. Even in 2017 we have people like Blue Drake raving how good it is. We still have missions being made for it (Look up Island War 2017) For the cost of this game you will get your money out of it if this is the type of game you like to play. Great for 4 person coop (You just join via IP) The stock missions are tough and will challenge even the most seasoned ArmA player. This has been one of the best games I have ever played and I loved the original OFP. Grab it when you see it or get the DVD of it. Either way its a win win.

Operation Flashpoint Dragon Rising was really fun to play. Despite the fact that this game issn't really comparable to the ARMA series, which is much more realistic than OFDR. A negative point would be the obviouse portation of that game from consols to PCs, which you can clearly see in the handling of the menu and some other small points. The only fix savepoints are not very nice, too.

The feeling within the gameplay is a fluent one of being part of a good story, which you can experience from different perspectives as a soldier within the frontline, a sniper on a mission at night, ...

As I said: At all it was fun to play.

YES! JUST LET BLUEDRAKE42 do what he wants to this game!!! PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE

One of the Greatest war games ever made. I've seen a lot of hate for this game and I'm not sure why.

PROS

+Some of the best sound that I've ever heard in a war game by far. I can't quite describe just how terrifying bullet whizzes are in this game, but there are some great moments where you'll hear one and your nearby squad mate will call for a medic. Also just the sound of your gun, the grass and foliage underneath your feet sounds incredible and realistic. 10/10 with sound

+Excellent voice acting and intense mission design. You can feel the pressure on you and your squad mates as you're getting annoyed with not knowing what the f*** is happening with the intense orders as your commander is drilling you with orders from your radio but, typical with a soldier's life, orders are orders. You really feel that sense of dread that death could be calling for you any minute in this game.

+This game manages to pull-off a pretty straightforward plot and one of the few you'll have in war mini-sim games. Arma II didn't have one and many war simulators have left that part in the dust. This game does it and does it well.

+A good assortment of levels with main missions and side missions as well as skirmish missions you can do and a mission editor. Although the mission editor doesn't offer too much, and drastically limits how much you can add, it's still a very nice touch

+An Open World that you can explore, while still keeping the linear story-telling aspect of the game. I really enjoyed that aspect of that.

Cons:

-Dated Graphics. This game at best looks like some of the initial released xbox 360 in late 2005 vs where the graphics should have been in 2009.

-Bugs at times, especially when reloading your guns sometimes.

-Servers are dead in this game. Although, if you have a buddy you can play this game in nucleouscoop and do split-screen play which is nice

All in all, this is one of my favorite war games that I've played and has offered me a ton of replay value over the years

Verdict: 9/10

Dragon Rising is the result of Codemasters' attempt to focus the open world, squad based, combined arms, realistic tactical shooter "Operation Flashpoint" series development around gaming consoles rather than personal computers, in contrast with Bohemia Interactive's "Arma".
As a result, the command menu was simplified into a more controller appropriate quadral rose, the group size was reduced from a 12 man squad to a 4 man fire team, and the number of entities permitted on a map at one time was reduced from hundreds to around 60.

Compared with Arma or OFP:CWC & R, the OFP:DR AI move slower and more cautiously, are more alert, flank more effeciently, and yet are less likely to hit the player (exception given to AT weapons). Voices are clearer and more natural. Physix, a more advanced tiring system, thermal optics, and individual medical kits were used in this before being incorporated into Arma. Overall, the Arma games have more to offer though, with an easier to use mission editor, greater mod friendliness, continued support, the ability to lean, customizable faces and voices, free editing software for a user to produce their own content, aiming without having to constantly depress the aim button, and much more.

Here are some comparison videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ns0-5O1tf1U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPxoLj1O0UY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TW8sPQDVJSs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWkbNboZwUg


Here are some useful sites to visit:
http://sar.n1bus.eu/
http://www.battlefieldsingleplayer.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=15750
http://www.nexusmods.com/operationflashpointdragonrising/?
https://www.media fire.com/?86lpqatar2a10#2g5x5y9bgkg5s (remove space between media and fire, this is Templargfx's file repository)

On the surface, this might be easy to write off as some kind of oddball Mil-Sim from a bygone era, but I think there are so many connections that call back to this game that you could really use it as an FPS Rosetta Stone. Dragon Rising marks the beginnings and ends of a few trends in gaming that call back to the golden age of FPSs. The 90s were all about arena shooters, but the 2000s were fixated on attempting to make something more realistic and grounded. A promise yet to be fulfilled.

I vividly remember seeing this in a Game Informer about a decade ago and reading about how the island, Skira, was accurately modeled after the real-world island of Kiska, Alaska. I think they used satellite imaging to create realistic terrain, which was a pretty big deal at the time since no one else was doing anything like this. The article basically promised this would be one of the most realistic FPS ever created, and would bring in this unfulfilled promise left by the industry of a hardcore, realistic mil-sim. After all, if they were putting this much effort into the terrain, they must be going for the gold, right?

I need to give some reference to gaming trends of the time to explain why Dragon Rising even exists, so bear with me as I lay out a ♥♥♥♥ ton of mostly skippable context, purely for nostalgia sake. By the end of the 2000's there was a giant void left in military realism, almost ironically and somewhat in spite of the leaps and bounds that 3D graphics had made. It was like the more realistic the graphics got, the less realistic the game-play became. This is partly due to the fact that the Xbox 360 changed gaming completely in many different ways.

Up until that point (2005) online gaming with friends was something of a nightmare. Servers would kick you for no reason, connecting with friends might require calling them on the phone and writing down an IP address manually, VoiP hardly ever worked correctly and also sucked up valuable hardware resources. Online gaming was such a cluster ♥♥♥♥ before the 360 and I don't know how the hell any of us managed to even do it. Not only did the 360 streamline this ease of connection for online gaming, but it also streamlined ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ EVERYTHING about gaming.

Gone were the days of having to install a game with 4 gd discs as you stared at the screen for an hour watching a blue progress bar inch towards the end at a snails pace. Gone were the moments wasted as you manually patched the games yourself (which inevitably screwed something up) and then putting something in the wrong folder, breaking the entire game. There's probably a hundred other minor inconveniences I'm not remembering, least of all being the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ awful internet connections and ♥♥♥♥♥♥ hardware everyone had at the time. Don't even get me started on Windows XP vs modern Windows.

The Xbox 360 eliminated all of this and even had a sleek GUI to put it in. Everything was easy. All the barriers to entry were gone. You no longer had to work to play, and with that, the floodgates were opened to everyone that couldn't be bothered doing a bit of tinkering around to get the latest version of [insert your favorite game] running. You no longer had to WANT or WORK to be there. The only separation between you and a gaming night with the dudebros was your ability to put a CD into a disc tray.

Aaaaand as you can expect, now that the gates were no longer being attended to, it allowed ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ anybody in the door and suddenly, there were more of "them" than there were of "us." And this was kinda cool, because it meant I got to play with way more friends that I otherwise would have, but this is where the shift happens. Up till that point, people just expected that the longer that time went on, the more realistic games would become and thus, the more hardcore games would inevitably follow, given that this was the end goal that everyone wanted at the time. Soon we would get this golden ideal of military realism that everyone had been striving for after they got bored with arena shooters. One thing not considered was how the ability to let anyone with a wallet play meant the larger herd could also dictate the way the market went. With easier ways to play, the games themselves had to become easier and entire franchises would become watered down husks of their former selves.

Veterans from the glory days of the big three (Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, and Battlefield) will likely tell you fondly about how the main game modes were closer to chaotic and silly team death match (or conquest for BF), but there were also a good sized niche of people playing early versions of Hardcore Search and Destroy. People would camp for forever, afraid to move, knowing that a single shot could change the entire course of the game. It was intense, and difficult and a ♥♥♥♥ ton of fun. If you weren't sweating by the end of the match, you weren't playing it right. There were no respawns or health regens. It was just pure, raw and hardcore gameplay. Even if it wasn't the most realistic game ever, this was about as close as we could get.

As these PC staples skyrocketed in popularity around 2007 with the release of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, these franchises would eventually go on to cater to a different, wider demographic of players. One would think that the more players for a game, the more people would be there to play the non-standard gamemodes. And this was somewhat true for a time, but this shift in demographic with a more "ease of use" philosophy had a way of slowly edging out the original playerbase in a way that wasn't anticipated. This would be fine if it only effected the games themselves, but since CoD was now at the top, all other companies followed them off the cliff hoping to cash in. Even FPS staples with a focus on "realism" such as Rainbow Six, would eventually follow the success of CoD by watering down their core formula to something more approachable. I don't think anyone would claim with a straight face that Siege is focused on realism the way that Raven Shield was.

So with all this happening, where were the games that strove for realism? Surely someone was still carrying the torch right? They existed, but these were so comically bad and unplayable (Americas Army, ARMA 1) that they almost acted as nails in the coffin for the dream of military realism.

SO! How in the ♥♥♥♥ did we get here? To ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising; a game that seems to have one foot in the hardcore tactical-realism pond, and another in the modern warfare and approachability camp with a RS: Vegas flare. Well I think it's pretty obvious. The market was clamoring for something realistic and believable with a slower pace than CoD's arcade-like gameplay. People maybe didn't want to do the Raven Shield thing where you'd spend an hour setting up the mission only to die in the first ten minutes and go back to the drawing board. This hardcore demographic wanted something LIKE that, but with the ability to just jump in and play. And they wanted something the was actually grounded, that attempted to make logical sense instead of CoDs more cinematic gameplay - which had realistic enough objects and environments, but also had a cartoon silliness to the multiplayer that sort of prevents it from being a gritty realistic mil-sim type game.

And that's how the hell we get OF:DR. A game that's core philosophy is grounded in believability and realism, but also in approachability. Where you could just put in the disc and play, but also where one shot could mean failing a mission and having to start over. There are no 360-no-scopes or Counter Strike style AWP headshots from across the map in Dragon Rising. There aren't a million gun upgrades or golden AK-47's or $400 skins. It's a game based on believability and realism that ACTUALLY delivered, but most people couldn't get passed the clunkier and less polished graphics... *sigh* ...well...at least ArmA got better.

8 / 10

Rifleman, 200 meters north.
Rifleman, 100 meters north.
Rifleman, 50 meters north.

Medic! Medic! Medic!

Pick this up now! Bluedrake42 has a working mp prototype in the works:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9yKyhvMVQg

Bring back red river !!