Perhaps the best thing you can say about Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising is that there isn't anything quite like it available for console systems. This descendent of Bohemia Interactive Studio's realistic tactical military shooter for PCs is unique for how it deploys into your living room. Previously, you had to sit at a desk to experience this brand of long-range, one-shot-kill, roam-the-countryside shooter. Now you can see what all the thrill and frustration is about without ever having to lay your hand on a mouse. And it all works about as well as it works on a PC.

Operation Execution

And there's the problem. Like Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis and ArmA: Armed Assault before it, this is one of those ambitious military sims that had a tough time with the transition from idea to execution. Even in the console versions there are weird common glitches. If I had a nickel for every mysteriously floating gun, I could probably afford a replacement helicopter for the one lying on its side instead of hovering overhead to provide fire support.

To be fair, it's no ArmA II. For the most part, Codemasters has done an admirable job making Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising play like it's supposed to play. Part of how it did this is with careful, sometimes brittle, and often brutal scripting. There are no sprawling open-objective road trips like the ill-fated Operation Manhattan in ArmA II.

Instead, there are carefully contained objectives with wide gaps between them. The campaign missions are structured like a line of hourglasses set end-to-end. Objectives are very narrow requirements -- usually a matter of killing a very specific thing -- but the spaces between them are broad and open. You can work your way toward the next objective however you want, and you often have a variety of approaches. For instance, you can shoot your way into a compound to kill an officer or you can sit on a distant hilltop to call in an artillery strike. As long as he dies, you've accomplished the objective.

Go green with night vision (optional, given that the moon is always bright).

But these narrowly defined objectives get to be a problem when you throw in hidden pitfalls and frustrating checkpoints. All that hard work you did crossing the wide-open part of the scenario is liable to be undone many times over. Dragon Rising is ostensibly about beating the Chinese. But it's more precisely about beating scripting. Let me illustrate this by laying out one of the early missions that drove me out of the living room onto my PC, where I could use a cheat code to get past it. And, frankly, it's a pretty sad shooter that drives me to use a cheat code.

Operation Heartbreak

The primary objective in this mission is to support the forward elements of an amphibious invasion. A secondary objective is to defend armored vehicles, called AFVs, pushing inland. The mission starts with you on the coast, running ahead of the AFVs to take out enemy infantry armed with anti-tank missiles. This is effectively a timed mission since the AFVs are just going to push inland no matter what you do. You're liable to lose one or two of them to anti-tank missiles, but no biggie, since they're just a secondary objective. C'est la guerre.

Once that's done, you have to destroy spotters on a hilltop calling in mortar fire. You might lose another AFV in the process, but those guys aren't helping anymore. Plus the c'est la guerre thing.

Now that you've taken out the hilltop spotters, you have a great vantage point on a village. Your next task is to root out infantry with handheld surface-to-air missiles. There's a whole mess of these guys, appearing sequentially in the same scripted locations. This encourages you to work your way around the perimeter of the village, constantly under fire. The last set of SAM troops triggers a time limit. If you don't kill them in time, your helicopter is shot down and you get reset to the last checkpoint on the hilltop.

Protip: Don't let that AFV die.

OK, once all that is done, you've secured the village. But the mission isn't over. Now you have to defend it from a counterattack. A transport helicopter lands and reinforcements disembark. They spread out into the village. Your job is to cover the eastern approach. A convenient gun emplacement will help you out. After all the skulking about for so long, the mission is almost over and now you get a shooting gallery with lots of firepower! Exciting stuff! You arrange your team into line formation, tell it to fire at will, and train your sights down the road. At this point, Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising is pegging the upper limit of the awesome meter.

Operation Outnumbered, Outgunned, Outflanked

Now I'm going to fast-forward to my 10th attempt at this part of the mission. Ten times I've failed and been reset to the last checkpoint. What happens every time is that the troops who just arrived via helicopter don't hold up their end of the bargain. They get killed and I eventually have dudes attacking me from the right, left and rear, in addition to the dudes coming down the road from the east. In a game this lethal, my four-man team can't hold up against those odds. It's tactically untenable.

So after going online to find out how other people got past this part, I discover the mission is punishing me for not keeping the AFVs alive way back at the beginning. Because at this point, I'm supposed to have one of them in the village to help with defense. And this means going all the way back to the beginning of the mission, replaying it a few times until I get to this point with at least one AFV alive for me to drive over the hill so it can help out.

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When I finally do all that, when I finally get past the checkpoints and the scripted troop placement, when I finally find a good spot where the AFV won't fall prey to the first enterprising enemy soldier with an RPG, when I finally get the point where I think I'm going to make it to the end of this mission, guess what happens. The AFV runs out of ammo. It turns out I used its cannon too much during the objectives leading up to the village defense. Can I back up to a previous checkpoint and conserve ammo? Nope. I have to start over from the beginning.

Operation Moving On

It is at this point that the campaign in Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising is no longer of interest to me. Any developer who builds an hour-long mission with so many hidden pitfalls needs to at least offer me other ways to play their game. And there's not much of that here. Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising is only the campaign and the multiplayer. You can later unlock some standalone missions, but that's assuming you played through the campaign. The PC version includes a byzantine mission editor (contrast this with ArmA II's mission editor, a powerful and easy-to-use tool that nearly redeemed the unplayable campaign). This mission editor will eventually make the PC version a better value than either console version.

So this is where I'd normally write that this is a good game for multiplayer. It's stable and the networking seems to work well enough. In fact, it's also a great engine with some wonderful gunplay. So, multiplayer, right? But for some reason, there's no support of dynamic joining once a game has started. Instead, you have to park in a lobby and wait for enough people to show up. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. Hanging out in lobbies is fine for something played in short fast rounds. But a game that attempts this scope and scale needs to let people drop in and out while a match is in progress. You can also play the campaign missions cooperatively, but, well, they're the campaign missions. See above.

Operation Cool Shooting Parts

What makes all this so bitterly disappointing is that Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising has a wonderful engine, with some great shooting and artificial-intelligence interaction. It captures perfectly the balance between lethality and vulnerability. Your weapons are incredibly powerful, but so are theirs. The gunplay is about carefully using cover and just as carefully managing situational awareness (which is particularly challenging at the harder difficulty levels that remove some interface crutches). There even seems to be a model for suppression, which adds an important element to the gunplay missing in other games. If there was some way to just randomly drop a bunch of guys into an area for a battle, or if there was something approximating Gears' Horde mode, or if there was a better mission editor, the lousy campaign missions would be a lot easier to excuse.

You don't often see a view like this on a console system.

The graphics are wonderful, although somewhat less wonderful on the console versions, where they're instead just quite good. A handy radial interface for the gamepad lets you give orders to your team or to individual soldiers. On the PC, the map screen is handy for setting up more complex orders, but it's rarely necessary. The AI is mostly very good, with only occasional "What the heck is that guy doing?" moments. The sound is fantastic, with the crack of bullets passing your head and the noise of gunfire and explosions.

Unlike ArmA II, this is a game I still want to play. It's solid, mostly polished, and manageable. I don't feel that the developers weren't up to the task. I don't feel cheated. Just slightly deprived. I wish this gameplay was applied to something friendlier, more varied or more forgiving. If I'd only had to play that village-defense mission four or five times instead of 12 times, I'd still be in my living room working through the campaign. Instead, I ended up sitting at my desk, sampling the later campaign missions and then uninstalling. The good parts of Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising deserve a better game than this.

This review is based on retail copies of the PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of the game provided by the publisher.