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On that note, Operation Flashpoint: Red River comes highly recommended from the developers as a co-operative gameplay experience and is even wholly designed around allowing friends to jump into your lobbies and play together. Playing co-operatively online with even just one friend yielded an instantly better experience and although we were only two people for the Red River review, the connection seemed to hold up for the most part (we did have a few lag issues here and there but were unable to determine if it was at the fault of the game or our lines).

Unfortunately, ‘recommended as a co-operative experience’ turned out to be a nice way of saying ‘our A.I is very, very bad and it will make you want to murder yourself in the face with a brick’.

Seriously, if you aren’t playing this game co-operatively with buddies, the A.I will very likely push you to extreme points of frustration. You have to order them around with your radial menu but they often don’t listen, stand in the open or will let you bleed to death without healing you when you are right next to them. Enemy A.I is also terrible, and they often do things which are just plain odd, or stand around doing nothing… it really is a toss up.

On some other notes of frustration, the game tries to keep things cool by playing some popular rock music and allowing Mr. Grumpy to swear at you a little more while you are traveling between locations on Hum-vees but I’d much rather be able to skip it a lot of the time. The swearing is also an issue which really came to light especially as in this rare occassion, I could not review Red River in my own gaming room, but had to review it in a family environment with Knox blurting out so many swear words left, right and center that I had to turn the volume down, with no options anywhere to turn it off.

Loading times are also unforgivably bad, especially when you are killed (not tough in this game) and have to reload a location two meters away, but for some unknown reason have to sit and wait over a minute for it to load everything up from scratch, again.

Controls can also be an issue, such as assigning the same button to multiple functions such as on the ‘A’ button (Xbox 360) being used for vaulting over walls, swapping weapons and healing yourself as well as other teammates. When we were playing co-op we ran into major frustrations and deaths when we were scrambling to pick up an RPG on the floor only to have to wait for our character to fully bandage himself, then fully heal himself before the game allowed the button to be used as a ‘pick-up-weapon’ function.

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This whole point is a downer and it saddens me because it’s gameplay issues like that, that shows that Codemasters weren’t giving it their all when they were working on Red River. It became a large and apparent problem within half an hour, yet it was never fixed in the game.

From a technical standpoint, not much has changed since the previous game. The graphics still look dated, even with the large surroundings and while the effects are good, the voice acting is abysmal with the exception of the aforementioned Sgt. Knox decent work, even if he is just banging out swear words as much as humanly possible and basically being given the task to push the entire game’s narrative across.

Conclusion:

Red River tries to freshen things up with a more modern setting that everyone can relate to and some frankly overblown attempts at getting ‘hip with kids’ when using characters like Knox to swear at you 24/7.

In the end it kinda feels like they try too hard, and I would rather be playing Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising or Black Ops / Battlefield, not something that doesn’t know what it is. Red River falls into a strange place in the middle.

Fans of this specific genre will still enjoy the game if they can get some buddies together, but the franchise still feels like it lacked the polish that its predecessor already lacked 2 years ago.


Scoring:

Gameplay: 7.5

While the game plays well for a very realistic sim-like experience and your soldier feels realistically weighty and vulnerable to the craziness around him, the gameplay is ultimately let down by bad control layouts and glitches not to mention atrocious A.I from your own squad mates and the enemies.

Design and Presentation: 7.0

Customisation and lobby systems all work well together, menus are pretty slick and effects are decent. Graphics are dated though, long load times and voice acting is mostly laughable, especially from the enemies who sound like developers reading foreign words from a piece of paper.

Value: 7.0

The 10-12 hour campaign can/should be played with friends as well as some other modes but when looking at the quality of the content, I’d say that Red River will offer decent, but not great value for money in the long run.


Overall: 7.5 (not an average)

Not a bad romp. The potential is evident in a franchise that already does quite a lot right. It’s a shame that more time was spent trying to make the game ‘cool’ and less time was spent trying to make it work well and work properly.

[Reviewed on Xbox 360 – Also available for PS3 and PC]

Last Updated: May 14, 2011

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Operation Flashpoint: Red River
7.5

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