When Bohemia Interactive first released Operation Flashpoint, they took the realistic sim First Person Shooter and added a vision of a magnitude larger than anything before or since. The original combined helicopters, planes, tanks, trucks, APCs and infantry and kept on going with huge outdoor environments, a background story woven in through cut scenes and a level editor that allowed you to fool round with almost any situation you could imagine.

The new expansion really shines when you look at the single player missions; they improve on the quality of the original missions and even the first expansion pack on a few points. It’s worth noting that the missions only feature one character, and this makes it a lot easier to get into the story as it’s presented to you by cut scenes. The new cut scenes that go with the missions are extremely well done, and for the first time, we get a feeling of the motivation that the character has for being there fighting.

A feature new to this version is scavenging for equipment but while this is a worthy idea, without a radio command implemented that order your men to start collecting equipment, you’re left to do it manually yourself or painstakingly in detail on the radio. Some sort of automation would have improved this feature no end, but as it is, it’s fairly poor and annoying.

A new island has been added and it features several new and interesting locations, including a few ruins, a landing strip, some very scenic rural and coastline drives and a lot of new building types. Clipping inside buildings continues to be a problem, so it’s unlikely they’ll become the focal point, but they’re varied and interesting nonetheless. We also see, for the first time, some significant settlements and the first towns with multi-storey apartments – while many rooms of these buildings are inaccessible, the roofs can make for incredible sniper positions.

Other notable additions to this version are the V80 Russian helicopter, a few primary weapons, handguns, a motorcycle, police jeep, and several repainted Russian vehicles for the resistance.

The multiplayer network code in Resistance has been completely redone to deal with the issues that it used to have. We’re fairly disappointed to say that the waning and comparatively small community will probably mean that you won’t find a huge number of decent servers, but performance is at least much improved. As usual, 56k users will likely find themselves in great difficulty online and by our estimation; the game probably remains unplayable online to those without broadband.

The graphics engine has had an overhaul to take greater advantage of the power of modern systems, and it really shows. Where the original 3 islands have smooth contours when looked at from the 100km squared perspective, up close the islands could seem angular. While the original islands remain the same, the new island for this expansion has much more detailed terrain, with small bumps, hills and depressions that you can try and use to your advantage. The trees also undergo and upgrade, and get a lot more definition than the fairly undefined shapes of the original. The overall effect of these tweaks makes the landscape much more interesting and realistic.

The sound quality in resistance has undergone an incremental upgrade. While the first expansion pack offered Russian accented voices, this version provides better local resistance voices as well as a very well voiced main character, despite his sounding slightly British.

Daniel 'Inept' Speed (inept@the-nexus.co.uk)

New weapons, vehicles, MP missions, single missions
Great new single player campaign
Huge and detiled new island
Graphics enhancements

Tedious system for battlefield scavenging.

9/10