Conflict: Denied Ops = Captain Blands Monotonous Adventures

Yesterday I downloaded and played the demo for a game I'd never heard of called Conflict: Denied Ops, a first person shooter for the XBox 360, although it may well get excreted onto other consoles as well. The opening "cinematic" was the first of many indicators that this game was clearly made with all the care and precision of an autistic ice sculptor with no hands and black and decker drills attached to the end of his stumps. The character models were abysmal and the overall graphical feel just fell completely flat, it's neither bad enough to feel stylized nor good enough to be labeled realistic.

After watching the opening cinematic in which some scenery gets a good destroying courtesy of a graphics and physics engine that can only be described as "budget" I found myself playing as one of two characters who fall just shy of "so lame that it's cool" and end up being just tiresomely lame. The controls were acceptable but I'm loathe to use such a positive comment, note well that I'm not saying the controls were good, just that moving my character didn't make me feel like a drunk coma patient walking through nipple high water.

Within 60 seconds I found flammable barrels and gas canisters arbitrarily placed around the level by some level designer who clearly still had "L" plates attached to his Dev kit. Oh yeah; these barrels had flammable stickers on them! As if we didn't already know at this point that a red barrel in a generic FPS will explode/catch fire when shot. Anyway so I walked around and shot a few goons noticing how unbearably weak the sound effects were in the process, honestly I've reloaded spud guns that sound more impressive than these things.

I can see why Eidos and Pivotal Games have decided to brand this as a "casual first person shooter", anyone who's played a similar game before will instantly label this as the most underwhelming experience of 2008, meanwhile anyone who's never played a FPS before is likely to stay away from this monstrosity because the box art isn't exactly appealing to the kindly old grandmas that are picking up "Princess Peach Window Shopping 3" or "Wheelchair duck feeding" on the Wii.

If there is a God this game will sell no more than 10 copies and those will be to the family of the developers, just like when a shit band plays a gig and only the bands girlfriends turn out to watch.