Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis is a squad based first/third person shooter set in an alternative 80s timeline (cold war). In 1985 bunch of heavily armed Russians from a rogue communist faction have invaded a group of NATO controlled East European islands. Your task is "simple", use all the available resources to beat back the pesky Ruskies and be the all-conquering hero. Well story always a bit sucks in these kind of games...
So, what you can expect from Operation Flashpoint? Well, I’d like to call this game a Complete Army Simulator, because it offers us several things that other games don’t give. You have a complete freedom of movement, you can shoot people (oh yeah...), drive tanks, APC's and wheeled vehicles, snipe, blow things up and order your men a round. In addition you can command your own squads of soldiers or take daring single missions on your own over a large map miles and miles across. The game is really damn various! Bohemia has done an excellent job at immersing the player in the Flashpoint scenario.
Operation Flashpoint offers  two game modes   – campaign and single missions. Single missions lets you jump in and get your ass kicked immediately, while campaign lets you slowly ease into the game. The game includes 11 single player missions (ranging from special ops demolition jobs to Helicopter/Tank attacks), 5 multiplayer missions and certainly a campaign where you start as David Armstrong, a relatively new recruit to the U.S. Army. Unfortunately there is no option to play either side in the campaign. The missions basically consist of following your commander, shoot at the enemy, attack, defend and don't be killed :) If you are a Quake gamer, rather forget all Quake tactics here. You do and you’re dead :P This game is realistic, so death comes quickly in the world of Operation Flashpoint...For example a bullet in the legs will leave the character only able to crawl...Also you almost cannot save, you can only save missions at one point.  Also the command system is not 100% perfect, if you are commander, everything is OK, but if you have to follow the orders, things get really annoying, because the commands often make absolutely no sense. However Operation Flashpoint's AI is probably some of the best AI I have seen in a game of this kind. The enemies are really phucking bastards and they are sometimes frighteningly realistic in their reactions to your approach and tactics.
The multiplayer features the usual deathmatch and capture the flag scenarios (plus some variations of those), king of the hill (each team fights for control over a certain area of land) and also some cooperative missions, but without an opportunity to play any of the single missions or campaign. The multiplayer looks to be somewhat unfinished. At the moment, there is a limited multiplayer element to the game at this point based on peer to peer connections, so it can get a bit laggy at times :( But by the time the games is released in the North America (September 2001) the game will be set up for play on Codemasters servers, a free patch will be made available to European players bringing the game up to this standard. So it should be OK very soon.
The graphics engine is quite solid and is capable of some remarkable view distances, but it does come at a cost. Shortly, the visuals are not the best you've ever seen, but they are highly functional, and it's most important. It's understandable, probably is not easy to render a 1.5km wide valley with trees, numerous troops, tanks etc. If you didn't play the demo yet,  the game looks like something between the Delta Force series and H&D :) If you want get the best graphics/playbility results, I strongly recommend you to run autodetect and don't change the graphics settings. If you want to play this game with maximum graphics details and resolution, you will need really powerful computer, but the game is very well playable at 800x600, so don't panic. Overall, sounds seemed to be pretty realistic too. Positional audio is absolutely great even with 2 speakers, it adds to the atmosphere and gives you the advanced feeling of being there. But one annoying aspect is the rather tedious radio voice, you can hear too much of "Oh no! 2 is down" and shit like that. The latest great feature of Operation Flashpoint is it's built in mission editor which allows you to do almost anything except change the terrain features. Instead you can use four very large island maps as your template to create your missions.
All that said, Operation Flashpoint is very good game, but it’s just a little bit too difficult for the mainstream audience. Just if you liked the  Rainbow Six or Rainbow Six series of games, but always wanted more freedom then this is for you! Download playable demo (64MB).