Operation Flashpoint: Red river review

The Operation Flashpoint first-person shooters have always appealed to a particular constituency: gamers obsessed with the military (along the lines of Nick Frost's character Mike in Spaced). That's because they are about as hardcore as you can get: unlike more mass-market fps games, if you take a head-shot, you won't be getting back up, and in order to prosper, you will have to adopt tactics that real-life soldiers would employ. While Red River is much more forgiving than its predecessors, it will still test your soldiering skills to the limit, and remains firmly in the hardcore bracket.

You play Kirby, leader of a four-man US Marine Corps fire-team operating in Tajikistan, close to the Afghanistan border, in 2013. At first, you're taking on local insurgents, but things really heat up when the Chinese army gets involved, with its seemingly endless manpower. The missions are very long, multistage affairs which typically involve taking on enemies from a distance (so we'd recommend you choose the Scout class, with its sniper rifle). Involving periods of being driven around in the back of a Hummer, engaging in authentically expletive-studded Marine-banter, they feel stunningly authentic, and become more varied as the game progresses.

It's just as well that you level up during that period, unlocking new weapons, perks and upgrades – one hot tip would to be experiment with different character classes in the early stages, as certain later missions require specialist, rather than all-round skills, and it pays to have levelled up.

Red River's core nuts and bolts are impressive: the graphics and scenery design are superb, the key tactical wheel for issuing orders to your fire-team works beautifully and the weaponry responds as you would expect it to. It's the first Operation Flashpoint game with a credible single-player story (although, in the interests of authenticity, it lacks the Hollywood-style set-pieces of games such as Black Ops). But it really comes into its own online, with some innovative modes, including one in which you defend a convoy beset by insurgents, and another in which you clear villages of insurgents and blow up weaponry stockpiles against the clock.

Operation Flashpoint: Red River is emphatically not for the faint-hearted – if you're anything other than a first-person shooter veteran, you will swiftly become frustrated by constantly being killed by enemies you haven't even seen. But it is impressively executed, infinitely slicker than its predecessors, and reveals the horror interspersed with periods of tedium that characterises modern warfare in a startlingly believable manner. Which will surely earn it cult status in the future.

Steve Boxer