Conflict: Denied Sequel

by Nick Judin
April 23, 2008

Platform 360 | PS3

In gaming, there’s more than one way to make a failure. Commonly, the biggest failures are games that promise to deliver top-quality content and end up being bad, mediocre or, worse still, just OK. (See: Daikatana or Peter Molyneux’s entire career.)

Of course, some excellent games fail by simply lacking the appeal to catch on or garner interest. These sleeper hits, like “Ico,” “Earthbound” and “Breakdown” each provide a unique, memorable experience—that nobody ever gets.

Last, and most certainly least, are the games that look bad, sound bad and end up being, well, bad. “Conflict: Denied Ops” is this kind of failure.

The name alone should raise some red flags. The title is “Conflict,” which is genius, because the game is, in fact, about conflict. Then you have “Denied Ops,” which denotes something so secretive the people behind the “Ops” aren’t even allowing it. Ironically, the game would be about a 1000 times better if it lived up to its own name, and right before the first level began, the brass shut down your entire operation. “Sorry,” the game-over screen would say. “That’s politics. Thanks for the $50.”

If that experience seems exciting to you, buy this game. It’s pretty much the same thing.

To be honest, I’ve probably lodged every criticism I’m about to make for some other first-person shooter, which should really show you what a terrible clusterf*ck of bad ideas this attempt at a game really is.

I don’t know who out there decided the two-player FPS genre was an exciting prospect, but it’s not. Seriously, you guys are 0 for 3. Give it up. The creators of the slightly less atrocious “Kane and Lynch” went so far as to remove a particularly nasty review from Gamespot and get its writer fired, which I would totally sympathize with if he wasn’t clearly a dumbass. He wrote a scathing review around the same time the site was reskinned into a Kane and Lynch ad. That’s about as smart as me slipping pro-Melton propaganda into my reviews near election day. Essentially you and a friend wander aimlessly through the poorly designed levels, accomplishing goals that rarely delve beyond “shoot this guy” or ,“make sure this guy doesn’t get shot.” Like its brethren, the game utilizes a revival system, so rather than dying when your health runs out, you’re forced to lie down on the ground, critically injured. If a teammate can make it to you in time, they can press a button that injects you with adrenaline. This is science, as adrenaline has been clinically proven to heal any and all injuries.

Unlike their kin, the main characters of “Conflict” have the constitution of cyborg elephants, meaning no matter how many grenades were just jammed up your ass, you will always have about three minutes before you die for real, or if you’re shot up with adrenaline a couple dozen times a minute, you’ll be fine. Walk it off, soldier.

The creators decided to balance this out by giving you the max health of a paper towel. I’m all for realism in games, but when the average enemy can take twice as much punishment as my character can, there’s a problem.

The gameplay sucks even worse than the graphics, which would have been groundbreaking in 2001. The game features “destructible environments,” which is novel for about five minutes, but ultimately can’t distract you from the gaping flaws everywhere else. The game doesn’t have a plot, at least not a coherent one. Maybe I’d have had an easier time following it if the main characters weren’t the most depressingly one-dimensional heroes to grace the pixelated screen in a long, long time.

Subject A is Lincoln Graves, a grizzled old sniper who, according to his Spec Ops profile is “a loving father and a committed patriot.” In his free time, he enjoys singing the national anthem, baking apple pie and waterboarding illegal immigrants—at least, that’s what I can infer. Subject B is Reggie Lang, who couldn’t be more stereotypically black if his voice actor was Wanda Sykes. His government profile speaks of his loud, boisterous nature and skill at sports. He uses a machine gun and a rocket launcher, and if “Conflict” didn’t completely suck he’d likely be the star of a spin-off series of Blaxploitation movies.

I haven’t touched on the level design or any of the technical nuances of the game, and I won’t. “Conflict” massively fails to appeal on such a basic level that I have no interest in reviewing it from a technical standpoint.

Perhaps I am biting the hand that feeds me. Eidos did send a review copy of “Conflict” to me for free. So, as a peace offering, I’d like to let the people at Eidos know that, in my opinion, “Hitman” is so ridiculously good it makes up for this and pretty much everything Secret Stash does.

I also remind them that I am ready and willing to give their games glowing reviews: They just need to make sure they’re good.

posted by Tom Head on 06/28/08 at 11:21 PM