Conclusions

I suppose, looking back, we’ve been fairly savage in our dissection and examination of Conflict: Denied Ops, but it’s important to remember that there may actually be some goodness somewhere inside the game.

Key to any of this possible goodness is the fact that Conflict: Denied Ops is trying to start a new kind of genre – and not in a good way, like Spore.

Conflict: Denied Ops is, according to the announcement which came out a few months ago, a ‘casual FPS’. That means it’s trying to be the type of game that people can bung on when they come back from the pub one night, sitting themselves down for a spot of quick FPS action.

That’s an entirely likely scenario, but it’s got two fatal flaws: firstly there are better games to put on for drunken gaming, secondly there’s no way anybody will buy a game just to play when they are drunk and with a few friends because of the first point.

Honestly, why would you buy a game which you’ll only ever enjoy when you’re drunkenly hanging out with some pals (and then probably only in the B-movie kind of way), when you could take a very good game and flip on some multiplayer or co-op there instead? Does Conflict: Denied Ops really think it can go toe-to-toe with Halo 3 co-op, multiplayer mode in The Club or any mode of Tekken or Soul Calibur?


Even then the multiplayer modes themselves are fairly disappointing and unimaginative – deathmatch, team deathmatch and your usual zone-capturing Conquest mode. The co-op mode is where things are potentially a lot more fun, but be warned that the entire game is powered by GameSpy – which isn’t as popular as it once was for many gamers.

There are some glimmers of hope to be had with Conflict: Denied Ops. If you can get past the graphics, cardboard cut-out story, wonky physics (a shotgun blast pokes a tiny hole in plywood, but rifle-butting a door will splinter it out of the frame?!) and disjointed, confused gameplay then there is a semi-enjoyably mindless shooter here. Maybe.

Crippling Conflict: Denied Ops though is that the competition is composed of far better, cheaper games.

It comes down to this. When I was at university I’d occasionally dip into my student loan on a slow week and go trawling the bargain bins at my local GameStation with a fiver in hand. I knew that the games I was buying would most likely turn out to be awful, but I’d buy them anyway because they’d fulfil my need for a cheap, forgettable game to while away the time between thinking about starting my dissertation and forgetting to start my dissertation.

Conflict: Denied Ops is about on par with those old bargain bin games from three years ago. It ranks next to games like Stolen, Project I.G.I and Aikens Artifact.

There are people out there who’ll disagree with me and who’ll claim a deep love for Denied Ops – but these are the type of people who claim that the original Evil Dead is the best film ever made and they should be discounted completely. Don’t listen to them; listen to me and wait until Denied Ops drops into the bargain bins if you must play it at all.