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When Bohemia Interactive first released Operation Flashpoint,
they took the realistic sim First Person Shooter and added
a vision of a magnitude larger than anything before or since.
The original combined helicopters, planes, tanks, trucks,
APCs and infantry and kept on going with huge outdoor environments,
a background story woven in through cut scenes and a level
editor that allowed you to fool round with almost any situation
you could imagine.
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The new expansion really shines when you look at the single
player missions; they improve on the quality of the original
missions and even the first expansion pack on a few points.
It’s worth noting that the missions only feature one
character, and this makes it a lot easier to get into the
story as it’s presented to you by cut scenes. The new
cut scenes that go with the missions are extremely well done,
and for the first time, we get a feeling of the motivation
that the character has for being there fighting.
A feature new to this version is scavenging for equipment
but while this is a worthy idea, without a radio command implemented
that order your men to start collecting equipment, you’re
left to do it manually yourself or painstakingly in detail
on the radio. Some sort of automation would have improved
this feature no end, but as it is, it’s fairly poor
and annoying.
A new island has been added and it features several new and
interesting locations, including a few ruins, a landing strip,
some very scenic rural and coastline drives and a lot of new
building types. Clipping inside buildings continues to be
a problem, so it’s unlikely they’ll become the
focal point, but they’re varied and interesting nonetheless.
We also see, for the first time, some significant settlements
and the first towns with multi-storey apartments – while
many rooms of these buildings are inaccessible, the roofs
can make for incredible sniper positions.
Other notable additions to this version are the V80 Russian
helicopter, a few primary weapons, handguns, a motorcycle,
police jeep, and several repainted Russian vehicles for the
resistance.
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The multiplayer network code in Resistance has been completely
redone to deal with the issues that it used to have. We’re
fairly disappointed to say that the waning and comparatively
small community will probably mean that you won’t find
a huge number of decent servers, but performance is at least
much improved. As usual, 56k users will likely find themselves
in great difficulty online and by our estimation; the game
probably remains unplayable online to those without broadband.
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The graphics engine has had an overhaul to take greater
advantage of the power of modern systems, and it really shows.
Where the original 3 islands have smooth contours when looked
at from the 100km squared perspective, up close the islands
could seem angular. While the original islands remain the
same, the new island for this expansion has much more detailed
terrain, with small bumps, hills and depressions that you
can try and use to your advantage. The trees also undergo
and upgrade, and get a lot more definition than the fairly
undefined shapes of the original. The overall effect of these
tweaks makes the landscape much more interesting and realistic.
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The sound quality in resistance has undergone an incremental
upgrade. While the first expansion pack offered Russian accented
voices, this version provides better local resistance voices
as well as a very well voiced main character, despite his
sounding slightly British.
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Resistance is a worthy expansion to Operation Flashpoint,
and continues to exude the quality of its predecessors. It’s
my opinion that Resistance has the best single player missions
so far, and when viewed with all the incremental upgrades that
it offers, it’s well worth getting if you own the original.
Resistance may not change the fact that Operation Flashpoint
doesn’t offer the masses the sort of populist online game
as say CS, but it’s unique in its class and incredibly
well done. Since this is an upgrade, I’ll only say that
anyone who remotely enjoyed the original should love this, but
that those who found the hard levels with few saves and the
ease of death got in the way of that enjoyment should probably
continue to avoid this game.
Daniel 'Inept' Speed (inept@the-nexus.co.uk)
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