YMMV / Operation Flashpoint

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• Cult Classic: The original sold very well, and it kept going for an extraordinarily long time (the developers continued to release updates until 2005). Another factor is the mod community, which was huge at its peak and has produced a lot of good stuff. People are still releasing stuff for the original OFP, though most of the community has shifted focus to the ARMA games.
• Do Not Do This Cool Thing: Soundly averted, even though there are various Bond One Liners uttered from time to time, occasional jokes to lighten the mood and some heartwarming Fire-Forged Friends moments. The message is clear: War is not exciting, it's unnerving. You're not an Invincible Hero and you're fighting to just survive as much as you're fighting to win against the enemy. See the War Is Hell entry as well.
• Game-Breaker: To a degree, the M1A1 Abrams tanks in Cold War Crisis - they're easily the strongest vehicles in the game and the Russian tanks can only compete through superior numbers. The campaign missions where you start in one are quite possibly the easiest in the game, and missions in Red Hammer tend to only use one of them at a time to even things out a little.
  • Minefields and attack helicopters are the only things that pose a really serious threat to an Abrams tank platoon, and you rarely come across either. There is only one minefield in the tank missions, and you're forewarned about it.
    • OFP also had numerous nukes. One pack included a biological warhead which would infect a soldier, and then any soldier they touched would get infected and so on. About 5 minutes after infection, the soldier dies. The first moment a player knows they are infected is when they die. An unreleased version had a bug where every object would get infected, so a player would be able to see the entire world die around them: trees; shrubs; lampposts...
• Narm: The Mad Libs Dialogue obviously, but some of the voice acting in the campaign also qualifies.
  • "Maybe things aren't as bad as they make out. Surely not. The government wouldn't... NO, I CAN'T BELIEVE IT!"
  • The Soviets speak with a very silly accent. Especially in the Red Hammer campaign, where some of them apparently inhaled helium.
• Obvious Beta: The Red Hammer Codemasters campaign is very clearly unfinished with some extremely broken cutscenes, a prime example is Marooned, not only does the ending cutscene cut between the helicopter hovering in mid air, it cuts to close ups of Dimitri and your partner, except in other close-ups it's two random pilots instead of them and while the game tries to be slow motion for dramatic effect, it inexplicably speeds up with chipmunk voices at several points, in addition to the campaigns somewhat poorly designed at times missions.
• That One Level: The main culprit is probably the mission "Alamo" in the original's Red Hammer expansion pack campaign: as an outline, the beginning of the mission is an Unexpected Gameplay Change, where the player is allowed to place defenses and ammo crates around a village (not that they're particularly important to the outcome) in an effort to defend the place from enemy tank attacks. There have been tears shed over this to say the least. It doesn't help that one of the easiest and most popular ways to finish the level is pretty bizarre, especially with regards to the game's usual tact for realism - it's possible to disable a powerful enemy tank at the start and use it to easily crush the rest of the attackers.
• What Could Have Been: The game was first designed with the intention of creating a purely non-public military sim, but the devs changed their plans in the late 90s and made the VBS versions of the game only after it achieved significant commercial success. Also, EA Games and other big publishers declined to publish the original OFP, with the general reasoning being that war-themed FPSs and other games had no real following or future. After the release of OFP, a suspicious number of games of this type flooded the video game market. And the genre is still going strong. The use of "iron-sighting" in FPSs also became more popular after OFP than ever before.

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