Conflict Denied Ops

Think of the Conflict series and you immediately conjure up an image of a rock-hard squadbased tactical shooter – or at least we do. There’s been many an hour we’ve spent on those games, inching our group of soldiers forwards in a nervy, piecemeal fashion, only for a hidden sniper to make mincemeat of our squad in a matter of seconds. But that toughness was all part of the series’ appeal – and it was incredibly satisfying when you did manage to keep your team alive.

So if you’re coming to Denied Ops with any similar preconceptions, then it’s probably best to chuck them out of the nearest window, because Pivotal’s latest is far closer to Eidos’ recent Kane & Lynch: Dead Men than any previous game in the series. Indeed, the game was initially called Crossfire before some bright spark at Eidos decided it needed some brand recognition. But all this will do is irritate fans of the older games while confusing those who come to this wondering what all the fuss is about.

  Lincoln Graves and Reggie Lang are members of the Special Activities Division of the CIA – in other words, they’re the men the government send in when they don’t want to get their hands dirty; their missions being the denied operations of the title. Quite why anyone would team these two up is entirely beyond us, because right from the off the pair take an instant dislike to each other – oldstager Graves constantly refers to the hot-headed Lang as ‘rookie’ or ‘junior’ while Lang (a poor-quality facsimile of Gears’ Cole Train) frequently makes jibes at Graves’ age, with the odd unnecessary profanity thrown in for good measure. This banter soon becomes more irritating than anything else, though – like almost every other aspect of the game – it seems half-baked, neither protagonist prepared to put any serious venom behind their sniping.

It sums up the game as a whole – the story will pass most players by as it’s the flimsiest of plots to simply tie the stages together. The reasons behind the duo’s jet-setting exploits are tenuous at best, as they chase down some suitcase nukes, and eventually the Venezuelan despot responsible for the game’s fairly vague terrorist threat. You’ll take in a ruined monastery, a chemical tanker in the Antarctic, a small Rwandan township and a castle in Siberia, but the object is essentially identical each time – go in, take out the bad guys, perform one or two secondary tasks and evacuate.

… continued