Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising (or, as I should really be calling it, Operation Flashpoint 2: Dragon Rising, because somewhere in the development, Codemasters decided to drop any hints that this was supposed to be a sequel) showed a lot of promise from the previews the developer to about halfway through the first level. There we were, playing our "not-so-real-but-close-enough" war sims like Call of Duty and Medal of Honor and complaining that each soldier has super regeneration and weapons that should have descended from Heaven above because they always managed to kick so much ass. Sure, it was fun, but it was never "real." There weren't any tactics other than to kill everything, and if you got shot at a few times you could run away and come back for more in about ten seconds. Certainly enough to take people out of the game, but not enough to fully kick them out.

Operation Flashpoint 2: Dragon Rising (yeah, I'm not letting one go) attempts to cure the ailment of making war sims "real" but instead inflincts them with not making it fun. While some of the aspects of war are clearly made "real," it does not translate well with the video game media. Sure, the scenario mostly makes sense, and the combat is true with what one would really face on the battlefield, but rather than make fighting a tense and nerve-wrecking experience, it turns it into an annoying one thanks to botched mission objectives and horrendous AI.

The introduction really hooks you in, however. A very well made sequence of events that take you from the early 15th Century to 2011, showing off the politics involved in a fictional Skira Island and where you come in. While it's entertaining and gets you all fired up for playing it, something is incredibly amiss when you start playing. If Skira Island is used primarily for oil production as its main source of economic resources, where are all the oil fields and why doesn't there seem to be any oil rigs standing tall (since the introduction clearly shows drilling there, after all)? If China is trying to take on the Russians at their border, for what advantage would holding a small island off the coast of both countries be when you should be more concerned about missles flying into your Northern Provinces? At what point did the United Nations just shrug their shoulders and decided to let three nuclear powers go at it without trying to resolve it peacefully? Where does Japan fit into all of this?

There doesn't seem to be any resolution to any of these massive plot holes during the game. But you're a soldier, it isn't your place to think about this, it's your place to fix it! And that's where the gameplay comes in. As a real-life soldier instead of a magically regenerating one or one that shoots aliens all day, you have to kick the Chinese off of the island by taking on specific missions that have you travel all over the place. As such, enemies die within one or two shots. But if you don't die, you can heal up your wounds using magical, infinitely available bandages and go back in for more.

Your AI squadmates will also ask you to help bandage them up. In fact, the AI will ask you to do a lot of things and then do it themselves. There are plenty of levels in the game where you can just bark commands at them and they'll clear an area with relative ease. Even if your radar shows nobody in the area, they'll spot hiding Chinese soldiers from over two kilometers away and shoot them with a pea shooter, killing them in one hit, without you asking or noticing. If you can notice something, your teammates will all remind you using broken dialogue trees that make them sound like Madden titles from over a decade ago.

Oh, and dead teammates respawn at checkpoints. Are we "realistic" yet?

But when it hits the fan, the AI will balk and become walking targets for anything in the general area. If you really want them to take out someone, there's a chance you'll be dead before you can input the command to do so. If you want them to drive a vehicle, they'll just enter the passenger side and see how useless they can be. If you want them to advance, they'll go for about three inches and then start following you again.

Some of these things can be fixed by backing out of the main game into the Map Screen, where you can see all targets, friend and foe (if they've been spotted by you or your team), and issue commands in real time. That's right, your strategy in the tactical shooter is most useful when it's least convenient to use it! This wouldn't be an issue if they wouldn't chicken out in the middle of an ambush and yet be Medal of Honor snipers otherwise, but it would be nice if I could issue a command and them following it in the way that makes the most sense.

Handling missions is a wild card as well. Walking, riding a jeep, or by helicopter, the island is particularly massive and it will certainly take you a lot of time to get from one point to another. In fact, most of the time you spend playing and most of the checkpoints you enconter revolve around you getting from Point A to Point B, occassionally dodging a bullet or two, trying to spot an enemy from a half a kilometer away until your teammates manage to kill them first, and blowing up a few vehicles and buildings with remote detonators or calling in a strike force. For being a "realistic" shooter, the objectives are pretty lame, but that's as best as you can get with an island that's supposed to be vastly rural. The HUD, while attempting to be limited, still give you way more than enough information to make this "real."

Your inventory has too many slots filled with weapons/tools you won't use, and it's all scrunched together in a small corner of the screen so you can't see what's going on. And if you're playing on console, this will require you to hold one of the buttons down until the inventory pops up, then make you select the weapon you want, THEN make you wait until your character takes the weapon out. You can pick up more stuff from dead bodies and weapon crates, but it just adds to the confusing system.

If you want to forgo the Inventory System, driving is your next best option. The laughable enemy AI will stand there, trying to shoot your tank with a pistol while you drill him at full speed. Your tanks will take multiple rocket hits as your laughable teammate's AI struggles to find the trigger of the tank's primary gun, while your other teammates hang out in the passenger cabin not doing anything. Then you run into a small tree. And all. Hell. Breaks. Loose. Sure, ramming into a three-ton vehicle is not a problem, but a 100 kilogram tree is? Now we're starting to lose the realism here.

Then there are the visuals. Brown seems to be "in" with the industry when trying to make things "real," but when it destroys gameplay elements like being able to see what you're doing, it makes it more annoying than anything else. AI doesn't seem to compensate with not being able to see, and carry on as they would normally. Sure, the game mixes things up with night missions and change in day, but can we all at least agree that, at any given time, it is very possible to see more than one color of the spectrum? The game looks awful at some points and beautiful the next, why wasn't this balanced out before released?

A lot of these problems can be saved with playing the campaign on multiplayer, but it can still be annoying to do any basic gameplay. In fact, it's probably the best way to play the game just to get rid of the annoying teammate AI, but enemy AI is still there and so are the poor design choices, as well as boring missions. Team Multiplayer can be forgotten about as well, even with the removal of enemy AI, because you're still stuck in old-time Deathmatch or Control Point game modes and given a vastly more limited area to play in.

Look, I understand that I'm in the minority here when it comes to OF2:DR in comparison to my colleagues, because the combat is still fun when you're not meddling around in inventory or trying to get your teammates to do what they're supposed to be doing. This game is absolutely as realistic as it gets, but there are so many game-killing elements that it's hard to even recommend a rental to a majority of gamers out there. If you're sick of Call of Duty or any other generic first person shooters, and want something much harder, this is the game to try before you buy. I really wouldn't expect there to be a lot of players left in multiplayer when Modern Warfare 2 comes out later this year, so squeezing a week or so out of it might be enough to satisfy some people.