Conflict: Denied Ops Reviews

Hidden gem

It's difficult to figure out where to start but, let me try and summarise this game. Conflict: Denied Ops, is a bottom of the barrel, bottom of the bargain bin FPS made by a dev team that clearly had no idea how to make a shooter. Not only are the controls a disaster, the concept is tired even when they were trying this, and the story is almost non-existent, the level design is just atrocious, and the entire structure of the singleplayer campaign is just garbage. Basically, they messed up everything you can imagine that it is possible to mess up. EVERYTHING is bad. So let's talk about the shooting itself since it's the most important. It is genuinely almost impossible to shoot enemies in this game. You might be wondering what I am talking about - it's a shooter, so you just aim and click right? Well, yes, except, first up they decided that aim down sights should be LEFT SHIFT instead of RMB, and they clearly didn't think much of aiming, or understand how to make ADS feel good, because instead of your gun being accurate during ADS, your gun is still what feels like pretty much the same accuracy as just hipfire spray-and-pray. And that accuracy is terrible. TERRIBLE. I am speaking mostly from experience of playing as the horribly stereotypical black army man, because he gets an LMG with a 100 and then later 200 round magazine, and your only alternate is the grumpy white man's sniper rifle, which you might think would be a step up, except in his case you get scope sway that makes you feel like you just drank 16 beers. It makes aiming with it just outright impossible, I think the game may actually want you to like stop, completely stop moving, stand still, and then wait for 5 seconds before taking a single shot, but it's completely impractical to do, because even if you use the stupid gun camera for shooting around corners, you can STILL be shot at, and you REALLY do not want to be shot at by any enemy, ever. By the way, this is a game where you die from about 4 or 5 bullets, on NORMAL difficulty. Now let's talk about the enemies. Every single enemy in this game is way better than they have any right to be, they are way stronger than you, to the point in the last couple of levels but particularly the last one, every single enemy becomes a full on black ops soldier with near perfect accuracy. This game also reminded me of certain other games from this era like Rage, where, every enemy can basically interact with the environment and blind fire and do all this stuff that you can't do whatsoever, and you're left literally wondering why you are so weak and being sent on this stupid two-man mission to solo what appears to be multiple armies of guys, all across the world. So this coupled with the level design sets you up with a predicament where you are constantly up against enemies that, outgun you, outrange you, outshoot you, and after a certain point they ALL take WAY more bullets than you to kill, so in a straight up bullet hose duel, you LOSE. In the last level, basically every soldier is some kind of spec ops guy in FULL black attire, which I guess is to signify they are the MOST elite men ever, which is just great because each guy takes like 15-20 bullets to kill and that's if they all hit, it's insane, these guys just don't die. And again - NORMAL difficulty. I played on Normal because, sometimes you play these low budget shooters where you just get a bad feeling about them and, on this occasion it proved to be right. I would have probably played on easy just to speed things up, but I couldn't. Anyway, so aside from the shooting being terrible, there's only like 5 weapons in this game. You get the LMG, the sniper rifle which is more like a DMR, a masterkey shotgun, an underslung grenade launcher, and a rocket launcher for dealing with the MULTIPLE vehicles the game throws at you, all of which you have no business fighting, especially given this rocket launcher fires unguided missiles - and the game throws not only helicopters but PLANES at you. You just literally have to shoot and hope for the best. In this game, you control two army soldier men. Whichever one you aren't controlling is done by the AI. You can issue some vague orders but most of the time, about 90% of the time, you just want him to follow you around and do his thing. So one of the most prevalent things in this game is that you will die nearly constantly. But don't worry, if you die, your buddy can pick you up! Provided he doesn't die too. But don't worry, your buddy gets what seems like either a big bonus to his health while the AI is controlling him, or, just very strong health regeneration, or bother. Enemies can still very easily kill him, but he is still WAY more sturdy than he is if YOU are controlling him. This means generally when you are on the ground you absolutely do NOT want to control your buddy, you just want to tell the AI to come revive you - which you can do and it will do, posthaste. Since it has that extra HP, it'll probably manage it. The only problem is the 'get back up' animation for your guy takes FOREVER so it's very common to get revived, begin to stand up, then die again while trying to stand up. Which is just great. Suffice it to say, the game is incredibly frustrating. The game is full of giant open rooms littered with catwalks and waist-high cover that the enemies all love to hide behind. To the game's credit, the enemy AI is quite good in the sense that it does a good job murdering you, it can even launch what seems like surprise attacks to me where it'll chill in cover, then duck out and blast you if you leave cover, usually killing you instantly. This is not a lot of fun to deal with though, and thus, it's frustrating. The level design too struck me as very... amateurish, tedious, since every level is kind of like one long linear one most of the time where you have to just backtrack to the start of the level once you get to the end, which is just awful. Also, it reminded me of Counter-Strike: Condition Zero Deleted Scenes, which was a bunch of singleplayer levels made by a dev studio, for Counter-Strike 1.6, and the original Condition Zero. The idea was, they basically came up with a bunch of 'ingredients' for their level designers to play with, like weapons, satchel charges and scripted events and stuff, within the concept of 'counter-terrorism'. And then they just made a whole bunch of levels, completely unrelated, none interconnected, with these mixed ingredients. This game had a similar feel, in that every level kind of felt like it was made by a different team, because so many of them ended in weirdly similar ways. Like several different people all decided to make their level end with you shooting down a helicopter or something, and several different people decided to end their mission with 'hold here until your helicopter arrives' and then a different team had a different idea and just had the mission just end. Anyway I hated this game. It was just bland and terrible. It was not fun, it wasn't funny. Even in the worst shooters, usually you can at least point to some interesting design concepts, or at least enjoy the FPS elements, but this game didn't even have that. I am not sure, but I have a feeling they were trying to make this game purely for commercial reasons, it feels very cynical and it doesn't feel like anyone who made this was really in it for the passion. It's hard to see this game as anything more than a paycheck to whoever made it. The main game I know of other than this game from Pivotal is Conflict: Desert Storm, and that was a very different, tactical, third person shooter. It feels like this game, was trying to aim for the Call of Duty crowd, but it falls so pathetically short and it's so misguided that it had no hopes of truly being successful. It feels to me like the death throes of a studio, and they made this game, and the studio shuttered the same year of its release. So yeah. Avoid this game.