Operation Flashpoint: Red River

“This is for all you new people: I only have one rule. Everyone fights. No one quits. You don’t do your job, I’ll shoot you myself. You get me?” This quote, from a rather epic and iconic film, is the way I would say that Operation Flashpoint: Red River was put across to me when I got a hands on playing of the game this past week. You need a team, you need a strong leader, and you need to be ready to bring everything you’ve got to the table because otherwise you’ll have enough lead in you to pass for a Chinese children’s toy.

It all went down at Samarqand, London’s one and only Tajikistan venue, on the evening of the 23rd where I was treated to a hands-on experience with some of OFP: RR’s four player co-op modes. I was greeted by what looked like a drunken Russian soldier, which startled me at the time but I have since learned that Tajikistan was once part of the USSR – the more you know – and stepped into a beautiful looking restaurant which was filed to the brim with a generous helping of many kinds of Tajikistani foods, drinks, and I believe, plants. Tragically I was unable to snap any photos due to my lack of flash on my 3GS and the dim lighting in the venue, but you can take my word for it (with the help of copyright-free internet images!) that the general atmosphere was very welcoming to a tired 22 year old trying to hide from the outside sunlight.

The relaxed Tajikistani mood was not to last long, however, as I, (along with all the other big name journalists there, including Andy “SuperKaylo” Farrant, who I was too starstruck to talk to…) was lead into the presentation room where we were shown a 15 minute presentation by the game’s development team giving us a run-down of OFP: RR’s key features, improvements and gameplay. With an added bonus of showing us the game’s introduction video IN FULL to go alongside the masses of information. As there was metaphorically a truck-load of news and information dumped over the crowd in this presentation, I’m going to break it down to some of the most bare basic chunks in a few paragraphs to make it both easier to read, and easier for me to write!

The story (as far as I was able to gather from the presentation) takes place in the country of Tajikistan, which according to Wikipedia is bordered by Afghanistan, China Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, where a fictional conflict is occurring between US Marines and the region along with the bordering Chinese PLA. You must lead, or fight with, depending on whether you’re playing co-op or not, a fireteam through three acts worth of unique challenges to ultimately bring peace to the region through the use of deadly force and pinpoint precision planning. The entirety of the game’s premise is to use real life tactics, such as: combat support, painting targets, flanking and suppression, to defeat the enemy and give one of the most realistic experiences of modern conflict ever delivered in a first-person shooter game.

There is NO COMPETITIVE MULTIPLAYER across the entire game, both the campaign and separate multiplayer modes are all co-op based only when it comes to gaming with other real life squishy people. The campaign aside, the multiplayer portion of the game consists of four modes which are named: Rolling Thunder, Last Stand, CSAR, and Combat Sweep – all of which we’ll cover later on once I’ve got my hands on them and not just read their names off a giant screen in front of me. Finally, we find out some of the improvements coming into Red River from previous Operation Flashpoint games which include improved graphics, AI and scoring system (what’s known in the trade as: everything in the game). OFP: RR developers then went onto explain that they’re going to take a Call of Duty approach (my words, not theirs) by adding a levelling up system using XP so that you can customise your loadout as well as improve stats between the four different classes you have to choose from while playing (which consist of Grenadier, Rifleman, Automatic Rifleman and Scout). As far as I could gather, these would count across all elements in the game meaning that multiplayer and singleplayer would merge together (again, not 100% on this, because we only got our hands on the multiplayer modes).

Enough of my babbling about the background business, though, I’m pretty sure you’re all set to go. Let me skip the free alcohol and food they poured into me and breakdown my hands-on experience with you. We were all escorted by the developers into some darkened back rooms with cubicles set up with groups of four X-Box 360’s. Some people were already in their sets of four, ready to rock, but as I was flying solo I had to link up with some others who were without a pre-prepared team. The only one on my team who I recognised was Richard Walker from Xbox360Achievements – he was an awesome wingman! The others were good, too, and I’d love to do some name dropping right here, but I’m afraid I just wasn’t able to recognise them or catch their names in between dying and screaming for a medic.

It also turned out that the Devs were holding themselves a little competition where whoever scored the highest score in a certain game mode (Combat Sweep) would win an Amazon Kindle and a bunch of vouchers and other goodies. Thus, we were all asked to come up with a team name. With four gamers, all of whom hadn’t met or really interacted before that question, this lead to a few interesting ideas being thrown up into the air. Eventually, though, I threw out an idea which everyone seemed to either chuckle at or nod in agreement and therefore our team name was born: Wolverines. If you don’t get the reference, please kindly click these words here, watch the video, and then return to enjoy the rest of this write-up. You done that? Come on. There we go. Okay, time for some Operation Flashpoint: Red River gaming action, let’s do this – WOLVERINES!

Mode #1: Last Stand. Briefing: Hold out as long as you can as waves of enemies of increasing difficulty attempt to storm the location. Points for killing as many targets as possible, surviving for a set time and taking out certain ‘targets of opportunity’ for a bonus.

This actually went quite well for our team. As it turned out we worked well watching each other’s backs and holding the position with a combination of two on the ground and two taking high positions. I was a Scout (AKA: Sniper) class and spent the entire mode hiding behind sandbags picking off all of their snipers who were not hiding behind sandbags. It was a basic horde style mode, with the only real difference being that you were inside the OFP universe and not Call of Duty or Gears of War or the what have you universe.

The only element I’d say which was different, and definitely warrants a mention, is that the game doesn’t end when all of your team are wiped out – that’s when the game’s over. No score, no achievements, nothing. If you all die, you have failed that mode and that’s it. The only way to win the mode is to successfully defeat as many waves as you feel you can and then call for extraction. As long as one of your four sorry asses crawls their way into the helicopter thats when you win the mode and get your score officially on the leaderboards. It’s a vicious extra, but really adds to the tension and strategy of when to call it quits and working together to get a tactical retreat going. I even remember watching Player Two  (never learnt his name, we called each other by numbers) get picked off in a one shot one kill moment two feet in front of me as we waited for the helicopter to open its doors. That moment made me jump more than anything that Dead Space 2 was able to deliver. Excellent little twist to the classic multiplayer mode.

Mode #2: Rolling Thunder. Briefing: Escort a convoy in the fastest possible time. Points for saving as many of the vehicles as you can and killing as many enemies as you can during the whole process.

This was hell. Absolute and unequivocal hell. The convoy wouldn’t move unless you stayed within about five feet of it, you lose points every time it stops (and for the length of time it does stop) and with two team members lost to driving duties and the other two only having the crappy gun turrets to pick off snipers I honestly believe it’d be easier to just instruct the convoy to slam their foot down and dump any unnecessary luggage to make the hummers as fast as possible. Sure you can jump out of the Jeep and try and pick off any enemies with your standard loadout weapons, but every route the convoy takes is inevitably out in the open and therefore you only cover your own vehicle anyway. Plus, even if you do jump out and take out the enemy before they RPG you to the heavens while using your own Jeep as cover, you’re still going to wind up with at least three flat tires to deal with before you can even get the convoy going again and the entire time you’re losing points because they’ve stopped! A fast-paced mode for sure, but it’ll get your adrenaline rushing for all the wrong reasons. Hardest mode for me by far.

Mode #3: Combat Sweep. Briefing: Clear out a location of enemy insurgents. Points for destroying enemy ammunition caches during the process, as well as completing the mission in a quick and efficient manner with as few deaths as possible.

This was the competition mode, so we all had our games faces on and our throats cleared ready to bark orders at each other to win those damned vouchers! The biggest problem we encountered was that we only had four respawns for the entire mode – and no, that’s not four each, that’s four overall. This lead to one player dying four times quite quickly (I’m looking at you, Player Two) and then leaving the rest of us having to spend over half the mode cowering behind a burnt-out bus applying gauze and painful iodine to our wounds hoping to not bleed out before the extraction team arrived. You have unlimited heals, thank God, but the challenge is being able to find a safe enough location to dedicate the required 20 seconds of healing needed to bring you back to fighting fitness. It was fantastic as a mode, though. Each location filled with enemies used multiple tactics and changed every time we played it so it never got repetitive and we were slowly ranking up the whole time. After playing the mode through four times, which I believe equalled just over two hours of gaming, we scored a very impressive 61,957! (that’s quite good for n00bs… you’re just going to have to trust me).

Heart-breakingly, we had already been told at the beginning of the night that the record lay somewhere in the 316,000 mark which a group of Operation Flashpoint forum members had achieved at 11am that morning or something ridiculous like that. Screw them, though, we got 61,000 and I’m proud of my team for all that work we put into getting that score! WOLVERINES!

Mode #4: CSAR. Briefing: Rescue two downed friendly pilots who crashed in hostile territory. Points for enemies killed, pilot survival rate, quickness of rescue and eradication of the downed helicopter to stop the enemy from capturing it.

The development team warned us at the beginning that this mode would be the hardest of all, but after playing Rolling Thunder earlier on in the night this was a piece of cake for me. I admit the enemies were smarter and the locations were much more close-quarters based leaving me and my sniper rifle feeling a little out of our depth, but it had a real Black Hawk Down feel which really made it for me. Especially when you rescue both the pilots and run victoriously to the extraction point for victory margaritas and pizza back at base!… Well, at least I imagine so. I’m afraid I didn’t get very long with this mode because we kind of dedicated all of our time trying to beat that forum groups’ Combat Sweep score so I didn’t even get to complete one game of this mode… Sorry, readers… Wolverines?

This was where my hands-on came to an abrupt end as my fellow team-mates exited the room and I swiftly followed suit to try and grab any remaining food and drinks leftover in the main lobby (scored a Kopparberg Pear and some kind of weird sesame bread. Jackpot!). Now, as far as thoughts on the game’s geo-political implications over the mirroring of our modern day situations, I think we can all agree tha… wait, this write-up has already gone over 2,200 words?! Whoops! Erm… crap, better wrap this puppy up fast! Operation Flashpoint: Red River comes out some time in 2011 on X-Box 360/Playstation 3/Games for Windows Live and is likely to be an absolutely stupendous game! You should check out the review here on Ready Up which we will bring you as soon as we can. I’ve got to go, like, NOW!…  ah what the hell, one more – WOLVERINES!