Operation Flashpoint: Red River
Sim as last time?
After the bloat of blockbuster shooters, the integrity of something like Flashpoint – the effortless way it spins fascinating, twitchy encounters out of the tiniest handful of elements – can be astonishing. This time, however, as you move outwards, it's also clear that Red River might manage to stitch its brilliant ideas into something a little more coherent and less buggy than Dragon Rising.
The game's new campaign is set in a huge sprawl of countryside. You're fighting not just incoming Chinese, but roving bands of insurgents who are already in place. The terrain is dramatic and varied, offering mountains, scrappy plains and the odd bombed out city. Huge skyboxes promise beautiful cloudy vistas and much more in the way of colour than previous games have delivered.
The attention to detail is wonderful. The patched-up and often customised weapons of the US troops who have already fought tours in neighbouring countries contrast with the sleek brand new kit of the Chinese forces, fresh from training.
It's still a squad game, with your fire-team made up of four familiar classes: the rifleman, who's a good general purpose soldier, the grenadier, who's a high-impact up-close force, the scout, who works best over distance, and the auto-rifleman, who's expertise lies in suppression.
Alongside the tantalising prospect of four-player drop-in co-op, your command of the squad represents one of the most obvious ways in which Codemasters is aiming to balance the intricacy fans want with the kind of immediacy newcomers will appreciate. In Red River, every order you could need will be available on the radial menu with just two taps in the correct direction.
(Incidentally, when it comes to making a PC shooter feel at home on a control pad, the developers have chosen to support assists like sticky reticules and snap-to aiming - and give you the option to turn them off.)
The team's taken progression to heart with plenty of ways to specialise your soldiers. You'll have load-outs to unlock and tamper with, weapon upgrades like red-dots and holographic sites to choose between and training and B-mods to select, allowing for character perks.
Everything comes at a cost – a boost in speed will diminish accuracy, for instance – but Red River shies away from huge, arcadey stat bumps anyway. A reaction-speed perk might make you a single hundredth of a second faster: you'll notice the difference, but you'll still have to learn how to make the most of it.
Aside from the four-player campaign, the standalone multiplayer content sticks with co-operative rather than competitive modes. There's a quartet of distinct game types which will see you surviving waves of enemies, flushing out embedded AI, escorting convoys and performing search and rescue operations.
Playing the first mode (Last Stand, a kind of Flashpoint-styled Horde attack) perched on top of a windy hill as the Chinese move in, it's a shock how well Flashpoint handles on the Xbox 360 pad. Many will still prefer mouse and keyboard controls, but with stance on the left-stick and the new radial menu working well, it's far easier than expected to get into the move-and-shoot rhythm of the game.
From this tiny glimpse, then, Red River's shaping up to be a brilliant game: a shooter which balances rewarding gunplay with a tactical thoughtfulness that simply wouldn't be possible with much in the way of obvious scripting. Authentic? I have no idea. Convincing? Absolutely.