YMMV / Operation Flashpoint (Codemasters)

• Broken Base/Contested Sequel : And how!
  • It got to the point that the developers of the original Operation Flashpoint (who'd lost the rights to the name to Codemasters) put out a press release explicitly disassociating themselves and that game from Dragon Rising, essentially accusing Codemasters of using the Operation Flashpoint brand name to lure in unaware fans of the original, and even later threw a Take That! at it in a promotional article for one of their own ARMA games.
• Demonic Spiders: Gunship patrols. As an infantry fireteam you have absolutely no practical way to fight them (unless doing so is a mission objective and the game gives you an anti-air rocket launcher), and unlike the anemic machine gun most FPS gunships are equipped with, these guys are realistically armed with rapid-fire explosive cannons, and can shred your entire fireteam in a second or two if they spot you.
• Good Bad Bugs: An amusing glitch seemingly caused by reloading while changing stance in Dragon Rising causes your character's hands to not move from their neutral position while the reload happens, resulting in the magazine change and chambering of your weapon seemingly occuring telepathically.
• Narm: The situational callouts are still as stilted as ever, but Codemasters clearly didn't have much voice direction going on for the actual campaign dialogue either, as the characters are often either rather flat or Suddenly Shouting and absolutely prefer to lace their dialogue with expletives galore. It's never as narm-y as the original Operation Flashpoint dialogue could be, but it isn't great either.
• Porting Disaster: Ironically for a studio named Codemasters, their coding ability has been heavily criticized, and both the PC versions of Dragon Rising and Red River are infamously difficult to get running on modern systems despite only being one hardware generation old.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The inability to tell your team to pick-up enemy weapons at all is one of the more glaring omissions from the original Operation Flashpoint/ARMA, it's not too bad in DR, where any mission with enemy vehicles usually has one of your squadmates start with a Rocket Launcher as well as generic friendlies carrying them but in RR you will almost always have to grab a rocket launcher yourself if not playing co-op, this is especially annoying in Red River in the Last Stand Survival maps, as the player has to juggle destroying enemy armor and helicopters while hoping the AI doesn't get themselves killed.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: Red River is noticeably easier and more user-friendly than Dragon Rising. You have the ability to completely restore your health instead of merely stopping bleeding, you're able to choose your loadout for each mission and are also able to start with both a marksman rifle and an assault rifle at the same time, and for the first 1/3rd of the game your enemies are poorly equipped insurgents who lack vehicle support and can be killed with one shot due to not wearing body armor. Even when you fight the PLA who are wearing body armor, one M16 shot will still incapacitate them and take them out of the fight unless they're patched up by a squadmate. Engagements also tend to take place at closer range, at an average of about 100 meters compared to an average of 200 meters in Dragon Rising. The only way in which Red River is more difficult is the fact you're less accurate with the assault rifle (capable of missing aimed shots even at 50 meters) and need to upgrade your accuracy with the game's RPG Elements.
• That One Level: The mission to stealth-cripple the oil refinery in Dragon Rising. You're supposed to stop at an overwatch position to wait for a decoy that will draw some forces away from the refinery. This position is almost on the far side of the refinery from where you start, and you will run for ten minutes straight to get there, and if the enemy patrolling the woods sees you, it's practically game over. Once there, you have to wait two minutes before the diversion starts, then sneak into the refinery, plant a charge on the power station in the exact center, leave, and blow it without being seen. Once you enter the refinery, it's nearly impossible to avoid detection, and part of the objective is to prevent damage to the rest of the refinery, something you'll surely fail at once the shooting starts. Also, you have a time limit. Also, to emphasize your stealthy approach, your loadout consists of the SCAR-L (lower-caliber counterpart to the SCAR-H) with subsonic (in other words, low stopping power) ammunition to go with the suppressor. The easiest way to finish the mission is to blow your cover at the edge of the refinery somewhere with plenty of rocks or trees between you and the North side, where all the enemy reinforcements will come from, quickly shoot everyone further south (it's hard to do it quickly because your sub-sonic ammunition won't down single enemies until you've shot them several times) and then pick off the entire wave of reinforcements from cover as they airdrop. Oh, and your exfil point is another ten-minute run away, and god help you if some enemy stragglers get a bead on you when you're trying to get there.
  • Also, Mission 05 in Red River, mostly because it's WAAAYYYYY too goddamn long, you basically spend almost the entire level retreating and fighting the PLA, and it gets the worst near the end, when you have to fight several APCs and a freaking tank as well, it's pretty tough to keep the PLA from entering the FOB and destroy the enemy armor at the same time, and the last couple of checkpoints are pretty far apart.
  • On that note, the mission in Dragon Rising where you have to secure the airfield. Take too long and the enemy will pound the everyloving shit out of you with mortars. Once you manage to take the damn thing, you're then hit with armoured vehicles.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The trailers for Red River imply a more somber tone as well as giving far more characterization to the 4 members of your fireteam than the actual game does, with the final game having an arcadey feeling, Knox being the only character with any real amount of dialogue and no real somber tone at all.
• Values Dissonance: The amount of jingoistic racist slang for the Chinese PLA and Tajikistan Insurgents that the characters throw around in Red River once they get pissed off, combined with the characters openly voicing intent to kill as many PLA as they can out of vengeance for their own fallen comrades, gets really uncomfortable for some players.
  • Taken even further with Knox, while the other Marines at least arguably fall under at least accurately portraying the mindset of soldiers, Knox's constant swearing, sexual references and slurs that make up most of his dialogue very quickly runs past this point into just being absurd.
• Vindicated by History: Dragon Rising at least has seen some recognition as a good first attempt at an ARMA-like game, especially on consoles, that while it had some issues, a good sequel that wasn't Red River could have potentially fixed.