Operation Flashpoint Dragon Rising

[FullAuto]

Oh the pain of realistic hardcore games.

 

Recently had a mission where I've died more than the rest of the campaign put together. Covert night insertion, sabotage mission. Take out a petrol depot's pump, but leave the depot intact. It's heavily guarded, of course. Bravo Two cause a distraction when I get on site, allowing us to get in. Two sentries are killed silently, one knifed, one headshot, and we reach the south-west point of the depot. Woods to the west, clear ground everywhere else. My fireteam is at the top of a gentle slope sparsely dotted with bushes and rocks. There are patrols all around the depot, and I can see a jeep with an MG at the north-west corner, and a Humvee at the south-east.

 

This is where the checkpoint saves, and this is where it all goes wrong.

 

Bravo Two's diversion amounts to firing a few rounds and running away. We are left to face the popular musical known as PLA Goes Bananas. Rounds come in from three sides, and we fade back into the trees to the west, taking cover behind the nice thick trunks and returning fire. A machine gunner runs up the slope towards us, and gets scarily close before he is dropped.

 

We are lacking in firepower, wielding suppressed rifles and submachine guns, no MGs, no grenade launchers. Troops board the jeep, and I scour it with accurate semi-auto fire. Troops board the Humvee and promptly get out as I engage it at 200 metres, and take cover behind it. Another machine gunner gets close, and Morales, the medic, is cut down. Not good. A patrol slips through the trees behind us, and opens up at point-blank range. I hear a thud, and fall over, and that's it.

 

Start again. My new best mate comes running up the slope towards us again, and I hack him down with 5.56mm, trying desperately to keep both north and east in view as troops flood in, again wiping out the jeep crew even as they get in, again stopping the Humvee even as it begins driving toward us. With only my rifle, and six mags, it's a bit of a tall order, and we take cover in a nearby hut, which is very little protection versus bullets but at least gets us out of sight. Unfortunately once we're in cover, the enemy take advantage and begin outright sprinting up the slope, and we are all shot up desperately popping in and out of cover trying to pin them down.

 

An attempt to steal the jeep works, and I drive it back up the slope to my fireteam, reverse it amongst the trees, and man the MG. At last, enough firepower to stop the hordes! An anti-tank rocket, launched from the hill on the opposite side of the depot, is the last thing I see.

 

Falling back into the woods makes things worse, as sight lines shorten, enemy troops spread out as they search for us, and we're engaged at close range from many different positions. Massacre.

 

Charging into the depot and getting low behind the nice concrete barrier works for a little while, until we're caught in a murderous crossfire from the troops within and the patrols without.

 

After about eight tries, it's beginning to feel like a time travel tragedy. I've quantum leaped into the body of a soldier, and I must save the fireteam, but Ziggy reckons I've got two hopes, Bob Hope and no hope. Morales quickly earns the Most Reluctant Medic Award, sometimes simply refusing to leave cover at all, no matter who is wounded or how bad it is. Sometimes he comes up to me, and as I bleed out, he stares at me, apparently entranced by my death. I can do without this.

 

Again, this time switching my rifle to fully automatic (shut up).

 

It makes the beginning easier, but throws ammo retention out of the window. Enemies I miss are suppressed quickly, and crawl for cover. My new best mate barely makes it out of a bush before I splatter him with lead, and something I should have done ages ago occurs to me. I sprint downhill, careless of incoming fire, protected a little by suppressing fire from my team mates, and grab the dead man's machine gun. Running back uphill, bullets chasing me, I switch to the MG, and get shot in the leg. Kneeling down behind a tree, I begin killing as Morales does his job for once, and three hundred or so rounds later, we're clear. The sheer weight of my fire killed or easily pinned each enemy in turn.

 

That's when a heli turns up and drops PLA special forces into the depot. This is also, coincidentally, when I start melding individual swear words into each other, saying them so quickly they're gibberish.

 

They prove to be just a little more challenging, moving faster, shooting more accurately, and attacking more aggressively. I discard my suppressed rifle for an enemy weapon, concerned more with the underbarrel 40mm grenade launcher than anything else. I'm hopping from enemy to enemy, stealing whatever ammo they have left and pouring it on, eventually running dry as the SF roar the jeep right at me up the hill. The rest of my team keeps firing, and I have time to wonder if the jeep will explode when it hits the tree in front of me and stops dead, though the engine keeps screaming. The crew are slumped over, dead.

 

The Humvee is coming again, but a 40mm HE grenade direct hit kills everyone in it, and it rolls to a halt. I have become very, very skilled at estimating the 40mm's trajectory. I have had a lot of practise recently.

 

Two enemy tankers, full of petrol, begin to ease out of the depot. At this point I firmly believe I am never ever going to complete this mission. A PLA SF soldier is sprawled nearby, staring up at the sky, AT rocket slung across his back. I steal it, prep the launcher, load a rocket, and swing it onto my shoulder. This has spent valuable seconds and the trucks will soon be out of sight around a bend in the road. I've never fired this weapon before, and have no idea what the trajectory of the rocket will be. I twitch the crosshair to the top of the truck's profile, lead it several metres, and fire.

 

The rocket slaps into the side of the truck and it explodes. The truck behind it has to stop. This gives me time to reload, and fire again. Job done.

 

The rest is an anticlimax. There's a lone soldier guarding the pump house, and his burst of fire sprays pieces of wall into my eyes as I round the corner, and I fire blind and kill him. I drop a demo charge and run. We steal the jeep and rewind our progress across the map to the LZ for extraction. There is an ambush waiting for us, and we take fire and swerve off the road, wrecking the jeep, piling out amongst the rocks and shooting it out, but after the bullet Hell replay I've been through, it's a doddle, and we have no trouble. We pile into the heli and soar away and I worry about the next mission.

[Knan]

That's leaving the depot intact? *chuckle*

[FullAuto]

It was! Most of it.

 

I think the difficulty has peaked there though. I doubt any other mission will be anywhere near as tough.

[Sunflash]

Did I just hear some famous last words?

 

 

Oh, no, sorry; that was Murphy cackling. Carry on!

[FullAuto]

I thought the following mission would be tougher, rescuing and extracting some POWs. Not so.

 

Intercept a convoy, take out the escorts, escort the POWs to the LZ and ride the heli out with them. What could be simpler. Starting down the mountain to the road, we tripped across a PLA sniper team. They lasted single-figure seconds, and I nicked a sniper rifle. Bound to come in handy.

 

Continuing on our merry way, we got halfway down and a missile arrived a little early and took out the lead vehicle of the convoy. I sent my team on ahead, and ran along a ridgeline, getting behind the PLA forces on the road. The range was fairly short, and the enemy was busy coping with the POWs, so I only missed once or twice, and my team rocked up at last just in time to kill the last enemy. Sprang downhill as merry as a lamb, rendezvoused with the POWS, only to be told the nearest LZ was a two-kilometre walk.

 

Charming.

 

Off we went, for a heli to home in on us all of three minutes later. It was a transport type, and as it passed over slowly and began to descend, I took that as a sign it might just have troops in it, and we malleted the living shit out of it. Four POWs with SMGs and my fireteam riddled it with rounds, controlled descent became a fall, and it went up when it hit the ground. No survivors.

 

HQ advised us to head down the valley between two large hills. I ignored them, because the valley was wooded, with uneven terrain, and fighting through it would be sodding murder, especially with four POWs to look after. We took the high ground to the right, working along the slope of the hill, and sure enough, enemies came out of the wooded valley and up the slope, where my sniper rifle made short work of them. Longer shots took a few ranging rounds, but I was soon crippling enemies, and leaving them lying wounded to tempt their friends out of cover. More than one enemy medic crawled to a wounded comrade and started healing him only to be cranially ventilated.

 

We crossed the valley at a narrow point and progressed along the hilltop on the other side, stopping to pick off an innocent (?) enemy MG nest that was unluckily in range. A house with a lovely view was found near the top, and as my fireteam assaulted and cleared it, who did I spy but more enemies coming down a nearby hilltop, headed right for us. The range was longer than I was used to, and I had trouble with the sniper rifle, so I swapped to my assault rifle and its best friend, the 40mm grenade launcher. First round dropped short, second killed an enemy, third took out the rest. Cue four corpses sliding on their faces down a hillside. The horror of war.

 

The house contained some handy ammo crates, and I restocked. As we left through the other side of the house, who should sneak up but some enemies. Holding their fire, they had simply moved quickly and quietly up a rather steep slope, unseen, and they were now within ten metres. A POW and an enemy had a lead-swapping contest, both died, and I chucked a grenade over the lip of the slope where it would hopefully roll down into someone's face, waited for the bang, and then charged to the edge and swept the slope with fire.

 

I was promptly shot for my pains, and fell over. As the medic healed me, my team finished the enemies off, catching them coming up out of cover directly at our position. I resolved never again to be first, and led my idiots away after swapping my sniper rifle for a machine gun.

 

Said MG came in handy when we bumped into another enemy squad coming the opposite way along a hilltop. I let off an entire 75-round mag at them in one huge sweeping burst, probably didn't hit anyone but made me feel really good. But we had cover, they did not, so my men shot them.

 

We traversed another valley, crossed another hilltop, and lo, the LZ. And lo, an enemy sodding heli landing troops amongst the buildings. Brilliant. I sent the idiots on ahead to take cover in a stand of trees, and went prone, readying my MG. Whenever they took fire, I pounded that position with bullets. I couldn't tell whether I was hitting the enemies or not (damn PLA iron sights, where are my sexy optics) but it shut them up. Then I started taking all the fire, which I thought to be a tad unfair. After some cover-hopping, crawling, dirt spraying in my face, and smoke grenading, I caught up, sent the fools on to the next bit of cover (some outbuildings) and did the same thing again, although this time the range was close enough for me to see the targets. I laid a chap down who came out to see what all the fuss was about, and rather unsportingly popped out to the right of a hut, then went around to the left and shot another chap in the back of the head while he was looking for me.

 

Last group of enemies were holed up in a building, which was a sound tactical decision until I lobbed a 40mm HE grenade into it. Extraction heli turned up, enemy machine gunner started pinging us as we loaded up, one of the gunners on the heli turned him to dog food with a minigun. Sorted.

[Space Voyager]

Sounds really cool, I wanted to try that game at some point. It is pointless before getting a new rig though, so it may be its next instalment.

[FullAuto]

It is a few years old, so your PC might be able to handle it. If you get a great PC, you might as well go the whole way and get ArmA II.

 

The video that started me playing:

 

[Pete]

What's the incentive for the chopper to pick up one man? That's an honest question because in a normal FPS you'd die and re-spawn so I guess there's some real incentive to stay alive in this game.

[FullAuto]

Often, in games like this, there are no respawns. It depends upon how you play, but usually they're turned off, or very very limited, otherwise it just totally undermines the realism and encourages people to be gung-ho. If you have one life, you play much much more carefully.

[Pete]

I went to my very first LAN party last weekend - it was helpful in that it was at my house

 

We played a bit of Left4Dead 2 as there were only four of us, but then we switched to GRAW2 for the remaining 5 hours - that was realistic enough for me and that was with 10-second re-spawns. I must admit that L4D2 skills do not carry over into real life, unless real life involves zombies at some point. I did enjoy my GRAW2 co-op though, nails as it was against the tanks.

[FullAuto]

I do love LAN parties, they're ace. A bit of a pain to set up, but so worth the effort.

 

The worst thing about the game so far is the lack of order detail and finesse, and the erratic AI. You can't assign your men specific positions. They'll move to A or defend B, but they won't stay on that exact point. That's fine out in wide open spaces, but it's not fine in urban combat, in woods, or other close terrain where you need them to be in very specific positions covering very specific areas. You can't assign them fire sectors, either, which is another nightmare because they don't really do it automatically. Issuing them individual targets works well, in that they then put down a lot of fire, but you have to keep doing it which leaves you no time to fight, and you get killed. Left to their own devices on 'fire at will' they sometimes hammer the enemy, and sometimes they don't really try, which is an awful ebb and flow to be at the mercy of. Ordering them individually is an absolute horror, and not to be borne (you have to look at the individual, select them, then flick through the radial order menu, and the system is simply clearly not designed for it).

 

Sorting out some co-op soon, so that should make it far more interesting.