Conflict: Denied Ops – Xbox360 – Reviewed

By Philip Dunkley

When reviewing games, it can be particularly difficult to place the game in specific category. I’m not talking about FPS or RPG or Adventure, I mean literally if it’s good or not. We try to find out certain features that stand out within the games we are reviewing, and pick out all sorts of flaws or perfections that allow to rate the game on a scale of 0 to 10 (or in our case 0%-100%). Conflict: Denied Ops was initially one of those games that was particularly difficult to try and gage from the outset, but quickly began to fall into a specific category. That category is Ordinary.

This game is so ordinary it’s not even funny.

To delve into the story a bit here, you take charge of two Special Forces guys in a series of missions that will take you across the globe in an attempt to stop a nuclear crisis. Switching between these guys, Graves and Lang, is seamless, done at the push of a button, so it kind of feels like you playing with one guy. Graves is Sniper and Lang is a Gunner, and that’s about it. There’s nothing more to it really. Quite Ordinary.

From a gameplay perspective, it feels really dated, with no new ideas or great moments that will rock your world or anything like that, and the Co-op mode works well enough, but make sure you keep your orders coming, otherwise you’ll find yourself very alone in a situation with your partner half a level behind you because he hasn’t moved from the last position you ordered him to. The controls have a few annoying points, especially in Sniper mode, as this is rather tough and not particularly good on the controller.

Graphically the game looks quite good, but really dark in places, so it makes it quite difficult to se what’s going on. From an audio perspective however, this game kinda fails in every department. The voice acting is crap, the music is crap, the sound effects are crap and the dialogue is really crap, once again strewn with stupid American Stereotypical War jeers and loads of swearing. I don’t know why a lot of games think that it’s necessary to throw bad language into a game. Is it supposed to be cool or something? Please don’t get me wrong here, I swear like a trooper, and I’ve seen some games use it to really well, but please, not every game.

Nothing seems to ever really happen in this game, even though it’s played at a relatively fast pace, but it seems to just chug along, happy in its own right that it’s a normal FPS with normal gameplay elements. Don’t go into this game expecting too much at all, but don’t go in expecting to be horrified. I would rent this game before buying it, cause you might just like living in the land of average.

I know this review is short for my normal standards, but I just can’t say anymore about it!!

Scoring:
Graphics – 70%
Playability – 50%
Audio – 20%
Originality – 50%
Tilt Factor – 50%
Overall – 50% (Like I said, Average and Ordinary)

Metacritic: 51%

Last Updated: April 7, 2008