Conflict: Denied Ops

Author: Joe Martin
Published: 4th March 2008
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Gameplay?

I’ll be blunt and straightforward here – gameplay in Conflict: Denied Ops seems to suffer from a severe case of schizophrenia. It doesn’t feel like you’re playing one good game, it feels like you’re playing two mediocre at best games which have been ill-advisedly hemmed together.

Everything in the game is divided, from play styles and characters to objectives and controls. Even the technical side of the game is massively split – but more on that later. At times this split can be a good thing, but most of the time it isn’t.

For example, some of the faster paced missions can be amazingly fluid and even in singleplayer you can feel amazingly graceful as you snipe enemies, mow down enemy hovercrafts and switch between characters effortlessly. At points like this when the gameplay is really working properly the game can actually verge on feeling graceful.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of the time this isn’t how the game works and there are several really awful design points which mar this occasional eloquence and highlight the awful reality of just how awful Conflict: Denied Ops can be.

Personally, the thing that annoyed me the most about the game were the limitations placed on the player. The main cause here is the context-sensitive action button, assigned to the space bar by default.

Conflict: Denied Ops Game? Play? Conflict: Denied Ops Game? Play?
Weapon upgrades help the arsenal expand slowly

“Assigned to the space bar!” I hear you cry, “How will I jump?”

Simple; you won’t. There’s no jumping in Denied Ops except when the game wants you to vault over something and this occasionally makes the game frustrating to navigate. Whenever you want to see if you can perform an action somewhere then you have to stand still next to it and see if the action indicator lights up at the bottom of the screen, thus slowing the game down.

It also makes some parts of the game into a frustrating minigame I like to call “Find the hotspot where you can place the C4 on the SAM launcher.” Not a catchy name perhaps, but at least the minigame itself is bad too – so you can’t accuse it of being inconsistent like you can for Conflict: Denied Ops.

It really is baffling because, at times, Conflict: Denied Ops can be quite enjoyable. Ploughing through swathes of enemies, swapping between characters and ordering your teammates to lay suppressing fire? That stuff is good. Even better are some of the pre-mission touches, such as weapon upgrades that build and improve your arsenal through the game, or the ability to choose from a number of different missions if you’re stuck on a particular stage.

Conflict: Denied Ops Game? Play? Conflict: Denied Ops Game? Play?
NPC allies fluctuate wildly between smart and dead

Ruining it though are the numerous mini-disasters which punctuate the game. It’s like meeting someone and having a really interesting conversation with them – but at the end of every clause they stop to tell you that they’ve done various despicable acts with your father’s wife and some plumbing equipment.

Like the weapons – at the start of the game you’ll be a little annoyed that you only have two of them for each character; a scoped rifle and silenced 9mm for the stealthy sniper and a heavy machine gun and silenced Desert Eagle (!) for the gunner. By the second or third mission you’ll have forgiven the game for this slight though and you’ll understand that the game is slowly building your firearm collection – soon your sniper will have a 12 gauge under-barrel attachment for his rifle, which is further enhanced with silencers and improved scopes etc.

Unfortunately, just when you start to appreciate this you’ll start getting annoyed with the clunky weapon inventory system which uses the type of “quick” radial menu used in games and it is awesomely difficult to use effectively in the middle of a firefight.

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