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Conflict: Denied Ops

Author: Joe Martin
Published: 4th March 2008

Graphics

Now, the graphics. You’d hope that the game might redeem itself here and that Conflict: Denied Ops could pull itself through to be a really tasty looking shooter. That might go a long, long way to fixing things and making the disordered gameplay less of an issue. It’s something we like to call The Far Cry Effect.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case and the game looks really very poor even by the most lax of standards.

Let me put it this way: my desk is located in the centre of the office and, given that my system has now taken up residence in a case that’s pretty much impossible to ignore, my workspace ends up getting a lot of attention. This is sometimes a bad thing as it prevents me using the PC for ‘personal time’, but the plus side is that everyone in the office sees and gets a chance to voice an opinion on the games I play.

For Conflict: Denied Ops that opinion was universally either a cry of disgust or something along the lines of “1996 called: it wants its game back.”

Not a good sign then.


The graphics are made especially disappointing by the graphics menu too, which might have you believe that the game could look quite good. There’s mention of High Quality Per Pixel Lighting and High Resolution Textures. Unfortunately though, fiddling with these rarely produced much of a noticeable effect.

Maybe we’ve been spoiled by games like Crysis, but to us these graphics are just verging on unacceptable.

There are no controls for anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering. Textures are low-res and shadows are blockier than a really dull game of Tetris where you get hundreds of those square blocks in a row.

Animations are flawed too. Now, I know that inverse kinematics is something that is incredibly difficult to properly apply – but I was sure that game technology had progressed far enough that we could make it look like enemies were actually holding their guns. Apparently not though – Conflict: Denied Ops has enemies whose weapons blatantly clip straight through their hands.

Now, normally at bit-tech we wouldn’t handle a graphical analysis like this. Instead we’d trawl through the various options for a game, find the settings with the most dramatic effects and do comparative screenshots for each one. The idea is to give you a rough idea of how the game will look on your hardware (Conflict requires 1GB of RAM, a 2.4GHz CPU and a 128MB graphics card supporting shader model 3.0).


With Conflict: Denied Ops that level of effort isn’t really justified though since the graphics are so behind-the-times and the individual settings have such a minimal effect. Instead then we’ve got comparative screenshots of the game with all settings on High, Medium and Low. Conflict is never going to look good, but at least this way you can see the defined graphical limits of the title.

Oddly though, the game does occasionally add instances of realism which help make the game stand out graphically – though these are definitely love it/hate it features.

The best example is the night vision goggles which either character can use whenever they want – and you’ll have to use it a fair bit too. The goggles work by not only applying a lighter, green filter to the screen – they also simulate the effect of the actual lens in the goggles.

In layman’s terms this means that you’ll get an odd fishbowl effect around the edge of the screen because of the lens on the night vision goggles. Reality-lovers will probably love this little effect—though they’ll loath the unlimited ammo and explosive barrels that crop up every ten paces—but everyone else will feel the same as we did; nauseated.

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