Conflict: Denied Ops

The "Conflict" series of games has been around since 2002. I played the first one and actually enjoyed it. I played the fourth one (Global Terror) for five minutes before uninstalling since it felt so obsolete in many ways in the year 2006. Now we have the "Conflict: Denied Ops" (C:DO). It feels as if the series has taken the right direction for the latest installment, but certainly not enough to actually buy the game.

Imagine a black guy meets white guy movie with all the gun fights in those crappy recent Steven Segal movies, that is C:DOVirtually everything in the game is B movie fodder, the main characters, enemies, explosions and level design.

The whole concept of the game is that you play 2 men in the CIA dedicated to fighting terrorists. There is some bad dude in Venezuela who has taken over the country and has nukes or something and is willing to use them if the US keeps meddling in its affairs. Very run of the mill bad guy stuff we have going here plot wise.It is not so bad that the plot is boring and predictable; it is just that everything in the game is boring and predictable as well.

When you play this first person shooter you are given 2 characters to control. Graves is the sniper and quiet old guy with plenty of field experience. Then you have the loud mouth machine gun loving rookie named Lang. Although he is ex-FBI the language from his mouth suggests that he was recruited from Compton or jail. You can switch between characters at any time by pressing "TAB" and order your teammate around with the squad order button. It is simple and intuitive but squad AI is barely helpful and the path finding can be really bad. It is not uncommon for your teammate to walk across your field of fire, open the door in the corridor when you don't want it to be opened or take the long way to your objective.

When you are not babysitting you are shooting. I haven't been in the military or know how to setup a barricade against incoming attackers. But I do know leaving oil barrels, jerry cans and gas canisters is a bad idea to leave lying around. In C:DO explosives are your primary target, not the guy shooting at you. I cannot stress this enough: There are heaps of barrels in this game. I can see it now; some 300 pound game programmers are wondering how they can make their game more interesting; so they just take the easy way out and put barrels everywhere. What makes it bizarre is that there are so many in places where there shouldn't be gas; I don't think I saw one BBQ throughout the game. Also some of the environment is destructible which means cover can be chipped away at with persistent fire, however only wooden doors, crates and wooden boards can be destroyed. So if you think someone in that flimsy house can be shot at, chances are the answer is "no".

You also cannot change your guns throughout the entire game. You get silenced rifle for Graves and a SAW M249 for Lang.It might sound boring, to be honest they are pretty cool weapons to start off with and as you progress through the single player campaign you get special attachments such as under barrel shotgun or increased ROF for the SAW.

Speaking of guns, ammo conservation is not necessary since you get unlimited ammo for your guns. Explosives like grenades and rockets have to be restocked. Although that is almost meaningless unless you are against a tank since you can paste down your LMB and run through each of the levels. The levels are really boring.You have a marker which tells you the distance to your next objective. Although it is very deceptive since you will have to travel the longest possible distance to get to that point.It is not uncommon to see something that is 50 meters away and travel 250 meters to get there. Level after level of glorified hallways awaits you. This becomes really apparent if you are given a vehicle to drive and you are given only small amounts of room to maneuver.

The sound is interesting in this game. It ranges from good (the voice acting of the primary characters and weapons) to laughable (enemy taunts) and again to not working. There is a bug in this game (and in the PS3 and Xbox360 versions) where some sounds will not playback. Sometimes it is not noticeable, other times it is infuriating since you can't hear vital audio cues in game.The enemies yell the usual 4 letter words at you and some hilarious zingers like "I KILL YOU!" They all speak English; fortunately they have the appropriate accents.

Of course a game like C:DO has cooperative multiplayer support over LAN and Internet, yes you can play each of the missions or the whole campaign with a clan mate if you feel the need to justify your purchase. There are also game modes such as deathmatch, TDM and Conquest which round out the competitive game modes. Too bad there were no servers for myself to play on.Which is understandable since we have had great multiplayer games released on PC in the past few months and I would assume that the console versions of the game won't do so well since Rainbow 6: Vegas 2 was released very recently as well.

Conflict: Denied Ops, does sound bad after reading this review. It isn't. It sits happily on the fence of mediocrity and stays there like the other Conflict games. What makes it troubling is that people must be buying these games if they continually make them with no substantial improvements. Not a recommended purchase with all the other quality titles out at the moment.