Denied Ops is the fifth game
in the Conflict franchise, none of which I've
previously played, so I was going in fresh with
this completely randomly titled game. It's apparently
a little different previous titles anyway, moving
from third to first person and just two players
instead of four.
The main inspiration of Denied
Ops is co-operative play. You have two characters;
one a quick sniper with the other backing up
with the machine-gun. Both have their problems,
unfortunately. The machine gun is pretty useless
from a distance and sprays it's bullets very
unreliably. In the last few levels you get a
rate of fire upgrade and can hold it much more
steady. Too little too late, though. The scope
helps in getting the more distant enemies, but
it's far intrusive and dominates the entire
screen and as soon as you start firing the screen
is filled with smoke, meaning you have to stop
firing to see again. It's small things like
these that just ruin the combat. The sniper
is even worse; I played as him for maybe 15%
of the game. The speed is good, but he wobbles
around like a drunk sailor when you're attempting
to snipe enemies. And if you can't hit them
in the head they can take up to ten shots to
finally die. God forbid someone gets close to
you while you're playing sniper; you're basically
screwed unless you can pull of a miraculous
headshot.
There's lots of upgrades such
as grenades, a grenade and rocket launcher,
a shotgun. But actually accessing all this stuff
is complicated and messy. And so is ordering
your team-mate around. There's just too much
to remember especially when some keys do completely
different things depending on whether you hold
it or not. Perhaps i'm a simple minded player.
After seeing how many keys I was going to have
to learn in Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter,
I gave up after one level. Denied Ops isn't
as bad as that, but it could have been a bit
easier.
Then micro-managing your team-mate
is another issue when he decides to just stand
on the spot and not follow, or go charging into
the line of fire and die straight away. You
can switch players on the fly, which is great
(the only great thing in this game). Especially
when you're down and need your team-mate to
revive you. But it would be nice if you could
drag your buddy out of the line of fire in order
to revive him because quite often you can't
handle all the enemies yourself and it takes
several seconds to revive someone. You're often
dead in that time.
Denied Ops does have a great
sense of teaming up with your buddy though,
whether is be real co-op or just a bot. The
sniper buddy saved me a lot of times, but more
often it was me laying carnage. This is a game
you need to play quite carefully with a lot
of cover and picking guys off one at a time.
Especially in the last few levels. It can be
quite annoying at times, usually in the end
of level battles where you need to clear the
landing zone to get picked up. And this landing
zone consists of you being massively outnumbered
and often having to use the utterly hopeless
rocket launcher to take out a helicopter. As
a quicksave game it'd be fine, but this is checkpoint
console crap, sometimes with checkpoints ten
minutes apart. The last level was ridiculous
- they seemed to have completely forgotten to
put checkpoints in.
The design and look of Denied
Ops isn't really up to a 2008 level. Textures
are rough and too shiny, design is plain and
lacks a lot of detail. One such underground
corridor system carved out of rock was completely
rectangular, just using the texture to make
the appearance the the rock was jagged. Nice
try.
It doesn't look bad. It's certainly
light years ahead of the last game I played;
SAS Secure Tomorrow. But it's not going to 'wow'
you, and certainly isn't a game you'd want to
get for it's art and engine capabilities. It's
also very flat - you'll rarely go up more than
two floors. Even the mountainous and outdoor
levels look like vast plains. Couldn't the developers
at least have painted up an awesome looking
environment background? Nope. But at least in
the ten levels you play through, there's a lot
of different settings and themes.
On a final note, apparently
this game was rubbished by players due to the
bugs. I played the unpatched version and found
no bugs at all. Sound was fine on Win7 64bit.
Overall a pretty average game.
Nothing really wrong with; it just gets repetitive
with it's two dominantly used weapons, both
of which needed tweaking, and design which looks
about '2006' not '2008'.
