Flashheart and I played through the first Campaign mission on the intermediate difficulty level. I think Flash's heart still belongs to ArmA2 but we both enjoyed the tactical gameplay.

The long draw distances, ballistics and use of tracer make OFP DR a welcome addition to my tac-sim/tac-shooter collection; most of the combat is at long to medium range and apart from the exaggerated bullet-drop calculations, the firefights are intense and seemingly realistic. The enemy has to be spotted, suppressed, flanked and finished before it succeeds in doing the same to you. The much-maligned buddy AI suppress and flank very well and the sim seems to get a lot of the dynamics of small-unit spec-ops vs. more numerous but less well equipped infantry right. I think OFP DR does small-unit fire-and-maneuver better than ArmA2 because of the draw distance, more maneuverable AI and an AI lethality algorythm that manages to avoid uncanny, incredible accuracy from enemies. I enjoyed hosing down a treeline from 200 yds with a vehicle-mounted .50 cal while my AI squad flanked and my human buddy sniped. In this sim you feel that you can take the initiative and maintain it with sound maneuvering, good tactics and smart deployment of the AI. The player needs some military situational awareness; hanging around for too long without a plan will squander the initiative and put you in a world of hurt, as the enemy AI is capable and aggressive.

Missions, objectives and force balance seem very authentically military. When this can be accomplished with real-life tactics and the friendly AI is deployable to good effect, that's a win for me.

The game runs flawlessly and is very well coded. The process of registering and playing coop online this morning was smoother than I have experienced in any online game and the ping was low between southern California and London.

Yep very good co-op mission experience - only let down by the assault on the Lighthouse where the dissappearing bodies meant we lost both the Javelin + the SMAW and thus could do anything about that pesky APC. Do'h!

Like the fact that suppression seems to work in this - you can put a hail of fire down to keep them busy, and send the rest of the AI team to flank them while their heads are down...

The rest of the campaign should be an extremely good played co-op!

Nice mini review Bahger. I agree with you all the way. I've been in a few really good multiplayer annihilation and infiltration sessions that had my jaw dropping at some of the action and effects. This game has some good substance that will hopefully get some "polish" in the coming weeks.

Flashheart ... don't assume that the bodies are always disappearing. At times I find it quite hard to find dead bodies amongst all the grass ... but they're there if you look hard enough.

Another good co-op campaign mission - the second one (destroy Sunburns + radar site) I was Team Leader with Bahger as Sniper.

We avoided conatct throughout - keeping low and infiltrating through cover and gulleys. Got set up in the flanking position near the missile launcher and waited for the other squad to draw off the patrols. Then enagageed the remaining 4/5 guards around the missile trailer. While Bahger + the AI remained on overwatch - I went in to demo the target. Job done!

We then headed to the next objective - skirting south of the houses/farm with the enemy - before tracking north to out us on the mountainside above the target. Once in sight, we used the howizter fire support in a tight pattern to destroy the 2nd objective.

After that it was a quick yomp to the final waypoint - both my and Bahger got about 1 kill apiece with our rifles, but both objectives complete and no casualties! Great how you can decide how covert (or not) you can be in this game and avoid contact.

Next mission - clear the beachhead didn't go so well. Got to the get rid of the AAA threat in the village, but then a huge firefight erupted with us and the AI pinned down at the building on the left. Frindly AI seemed a bit dense in that it didn't seem to take cover as much as it should have done, but we did get flanked by a load of PLA who used the fire support from the village to try and close with us...

Top co-op gaming though!

Yeah, it's good coop. Good terrain, good ballistics, tracer and certain tactical flourishes absent in other realistic infantry/spec-ops sims such as the ability to bypass enemy concentrations enroute to an objective and to assault along any axis. The presence of other, AI-controlled squads in many of the missions lends a welcome air of battlefield realism but it still feels like you are fighting within a bubble. In thinking about this, I reckon the lack of a real sense of a "live" battlefield is what will hold this sim back and limit its longevity unless it can be ingeniously addressed by mod-makers (limited, I believe to 80 live entities). Implementation of support fire is very abstracted and unrealistically effortless, instantaneous and precise; it's lovely to look at, but not very hard-core. Codies are going to have to really nail the DLC.