We like to think of it as tough love. Spend ages sprinting across a field toward the enemy emplacement…only to get a bullet planted deep in your melon when you’re still 200 yards away. Anyone who opts to “go Rambo” and charges up to opponents is in for a very speedy lesson in Operation Flashpoint.

Welcome to a world where every bullet is potentially lethal, every enemy is unpredictable, and attempting to tea-bag someone will just get an embarrassing Polaroid stapled to your coroner’s report. Once you get used to scanning the horizon for hostiles and taking out threats at an average range of 150 yards, though, it all suddenly clicks and you become just as dangerous, if not more so.

Intriguingly, Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising doesn’t have levels; it has AOs, each a vast “area of operation” that offers you (and up to three co-op buddies) the chance to express yourself tactically in a way that no other shooter on Xbox 360 quite manages. Faced with insurmountable odds during a frontal assault? You always have the space, if not necessarily the time, to stage a side-on or rear attack. When you fail a mission and end up face-down in the dirt, you don’t just try again; you take a moment to adjust the plan. So while Call of Duty and the like aim for Hollywood-inspired set-pieces, Operation Flashpoint actually feels like being a soldier…at least as far as our sorry magazine-editor asses can tell.

On top of that feat of magic, we were also impressed by the vastness and remarkable atmosphere of the island on which the game takes place. While Codies’ Ego engine can’t replicate Dirt 2 levels of fidelity, you’ll still find breathtaking valleys, dense forests, and thick grassland as you progress through the game. The environment is also one of the thousands of variables that Operation Flashpoint throws at you during a firefight. Finding cover can be extremely tough, and vegetation often obscures your vision if you clatter to a prone position to avoid enemy fire. Then there’s the sheer range involved in a battlefield this big — bullets don’t travel in a straight line over hundreds of yards, so you have to account for the dropoff.

You might think this distance sounds less involving, but don’t be fooled. It’s still deeply satisfying to plug bad guys from afar, and the relative comfort of a strategically advantageous position provides a neat contrast to the panicked moments when the enemy has the drop on you. There’s also plenty of variety in the missions, and while there are recommended ways to solve all of them, your commanding officer isn’t going to complain as long as you complete the objectives. Broadly, they’re split into two main flavors — stealth and infantry — but the pace with which you progress doesn’t actually change much between the two: a sort of measured efficiency is best, with the odd frantic time-limited charge. Really, it’s the suggested tactics, the supplied equipment, and the nature of the objectives that keep things spicy.

Multiplayer also boosts the number of options before you. Operation Flashpoint supports co-op throughout the entire campaign, replacing your A.I. squadmates with weak, fallible humans. Alternatively, a solid competitive multiplayer mode allows two squads of four to face off against each other with the A.I. providing the background of a larger battle.

Needless to say, with such a realistic depiction of warfare, you’re going to have frustrating periods where you end up being repeatedly killed, but that can be argued away as par for the course. What would help is if Operation Flashpoint didn’t compound the problem with confusing directions, a merciless checkpoint system, and occasionally broken objectives. If you’re particularly blunder-prone, you can accidentally render a mission impossible, trigger a checkpoint that prevents you from backtracking to fix the problem, and worst of all, spend ages trying to work out what’s going on because the game doesn’t tell you what you did wrong (see sidebar, above). It’s at these moments where the game’s flexibility butts heads with the reliability we’re used to from an Xbox 360 game.

In spite of all this, Operation Flashpoint’s charm never wanes because, ultimately, it’s about total freedom and glorious, barely contained ambition. Whatever you’re up to — whether it’s assaulting an airfield, disabling a fuel depot, or legging it with a bunch of liberated POWs through the early-morning mist — you feel like your contribution, be it direct or strategic, is making the difference between victory and defeat in a large-scale conflict. Even if that conflict occasionally goes a bit mad like a catnip-addled kitten. We can guarantee you won’t have played an FPS quite like this on Xbox 360, but now that one’s arrived, you certainly should.

On Xbox 360

+ Massive, atmospheric location.

+ This satisfying long-range combat is as close as you want to get to war.

- Game sometimes gets confused.

? Is the haphazard checkpointing just meant to start another rant on save-anywhere? (It worked.)

8.0