Oh, dear, Operation Flashpoint. I wasn’t enough for you, was I? Lots of us loved you more than you ever knew, but that wasn’t enough, either. Cold War Crisis and Resistance, we were there for that – some of us even had Elite on the Xbox. Dragon Rising went another way, but some of us still loved you. I know I did. But it wasn’t enough for you. You looked over at the prettier, more popular modern military first person shooters and thought, “I want to be like that…” Off you went and back you came, like the ugly girl at the school dance, your make up and new dress never able to hide the face underneath.

And that tortured metaphor is how I feel about Red River. OK, so let’s try to untorture it a little bit, shall we? Well, like some sort of mad, Single White Female-esque stalker Red River has stolen what it has perceived as the best parts from other, BETTER shooters. We have the immediacy and close range of Call of Duty, the control scheme and humour of Bad Company, the swearing of Bulletstorm, the poor iron sights and linearity of Medal of Honor and some of the visual effects from Kane And Lynch: Dog Days. OK, then, one at a time?

The close range of Call of Duty works when your character is a lightning fast super-soldier with the melee capabilities of a bipedal tiger. This does not describe the members of Bravo Team. Those of us who played the original (let’s class Dragon Rising as the original for the sake of this review, as the only thing these games share with the true originals is the name), the terror of hearing “Enemy rifleman 50 meters” was something to behold. How did they get so close? Almost all your fights were over distances of 100 meters, and most of your shots were aimed at muzzle flashes in the distance. The control scheme and game mechanics were well suited to this, with slow reload and weapon switching times which felt a bit more realistic than your other FPSs. But Red River commonly has you fighting at extremely close range – 25 meters or less, but has maintained the old mechanics, meaning that you now no longer rely on strategy or planning or a steady aim, but twitch gaming that sits poorly within the engine.

However, key features have been inexplicably removed – for example, the admittedly useless fighting knife, so you have no melee capability at all now. Add to this that a hit to the chest or head can kill you outright or down you (more on this later) with a single round is very annoying. Bizarrely, you now no longer carry sidearm in addition to your two small arms, but can carry a another primary weapon instead of the pistol. This is never really a problem as the Tajikistani enemies who use AK47 and other Russian weapons seem to be happy to keep large stocks of NATO ammunition and STANAG magazines, so you will NEVER run out of ammo. That being said, the Chinese are also happy to leave caches of ammo for your weaponry as well – very sportsmanlike! I digress – what I am saying is basically that the game is too unwieldy to be what it wants to be.

The humour. Oh, sweet Jesus, the “”Humour””. There aren’t enough quotation marks to express how SARCASTIC I am being. Bad Company brilliantly infused what was a fairly staid and dry campaign with some brilliant humour that really made the game come alive. You had four believable characters talking believably to each and saying believably stupid things. This TRIPE that I have had to endure… Honestly, Sergeant Knox is one of the worst characters in videogame history. Truly terrible. Apparently he is a long term, grizzled veteran who also has a natty line in film quotes and some of the STUPIDEST swearing I have heard this side of Rogue Warrior. Now, Bulletstorm embraced its stupid swearing and I found it strangely endearing.

This, on the other hand, is pointless swearing. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love swearing. I’m Scottish, so it is like punctuation to me – even writing this without swearing is a challenge. But being told the same things again and again and hearing his tirades would cause any real soldier to approach him, inform him that HE HAD DONE THE REQUISITE TRAINING BEFORE BEING DEPLOYED and possibly raise a complaint for continuous and abusive harassment. Oh, the voice actor is actually very good, by the way – he just hasn’t been given anything to go on. On the subject of dialogue, things I will hear in my sleep until the day I die – “Douchebags. Twenty. FIVE! Meters. NORTH!”, “They got our range!” and “It’s raining hell over here!” There are honestly only about 4 radio responses from the other units and they ARE repeated. For. EVER.

Taking inspiration from Medal of Honor? Why? Well, children… I don’t have a clue. First, the scopes. Now, I would imagine that one might put an RDS or ACOG (Red Dot Sight and Advanced Combat Optical Gunsight, fact fans!) onto a weapon in order to improve how well you can aim with it. Not here. They not only manage to obscure most of your vision but – particularly with the M16/M4 – the red dot or reticule is actively obscured by the front sight of the gun. This can lead to aiming a bit too high, or low on a fairly regular basis, so you’re probably best sticking with iron sights until you get the sniper, or even better thermal scope.

The linearity is the greatest annoyance in the game as they invariably start with an UNSKIPPABLE journey to the start of the mission (following some stupid, but thankfully skippable briefing from a stupid Colonel. I think that might have been his name – Colonel Stupid) that takes 3 to 5 minutes. Yes, really. They also end with a 3 to 5 minute long egress from the mission – also UNSKIPPABLE. In between, there are boundaries everywhere that stop you from moving on too far or from using your initiative.

Example – One mission has you holding a number of lines from an invading army. Yes, an ENTIRE army. That’s fine let’s do it. Now will be a good time to bring up the AI, actually, as this was where I had my biggest problem. The first line of defence has a lovely defensible compound – a 2-storey building facing the enemy with an emplaced .50 cal turret upstairs, a low wall and arch to the left with buildings providing cover to right and left. Straight away, it is annoying that you STILL can’t order your squad to deploy the mines they are equipped with, a hangover from the original game which is utterly baffling. Moving on, though… Using my immense tactical genius I ordered my Automatic Rifleman to the corner of the wall to cover our front left quarter, my Rifleman was ordered to take up the turret and cover the right, while the Grenadier was sent beside the turret to cover the centre. As Sniper, I hoped to remain mobile and hit any targets of opportunity. The thinking was thus – the suppressive fire from the machine guns would funnel the enemy either into Alpha and Charlie’s field of fire, or into an alley to our front where we could pick them off.

Now. First issue – Numerous times you are sent onto roofs to cover your friends in other fireteams. Sadly when you try to place your own men with precision on a roof, your only options are “Secure Building” or “Defend Building”. Secure Building makes them go inside and clear it, but they won’t take cover and fire from the windows unless you’re very lucky. Defend Building tends to make them stand outside the building and stop people from going in. I have NEVER needed my men to do this. You get around this by aiming at sandbags on the roof to make them move to that position, but it is very sloppy.

Second issue – The AI. Or perhaps it should just be called the A. Christ, it is ropey. Really, really ropey. My Automatic Rifleman, no matter WHAT I kept telling him to do, decided that the other side of the wall was THE place to be. That was where all the cool kids were, apparently. Them AND THE CHINESE ARMY. Nothing could convince him to just PLEASE COME INSIDE THE COMPOUND, as this option wasn’t on the QCR (Quick Command Radial). Eventually, he just lay down out there and that was fine. The Rifleman took the turret without a hitch, but the Grenadier decided to run off the front of the building and stand there. This time when I tried to select him, I now couldn’t select any of my men, just the entire unit. I would find this happening VERY frequently as the game went on. But more on the A”I”. I said earlier that I would come back to the being downed with one bullet.

Health is dealt with very well in Red River – a bullet wound will cause you to bleed, so you need to hold A to bandage yourself, which takes a few seconds. If you were wounded badly enough, you might have to further repair your injuries to stop things like decreased speed, lower accuracy and what have you. It is VERY good, actually. Being downed means that you can be revived, and you will lie there and bleed to death at different speeds depending on the severity of the wound. If you have the AUDACITY to get downed on anything other than flat, ground level terrain you will die.

I was shot at the top of some stairs and was  downed, but when I called for a medic, he incredulously asked “How the hell do you expect me to do that?” After yelling for him to climb the EFFING stairs, I died. And this happened A LOT. Add this that none of the AI have the slightest regard for their personal safety and the attention span of an ADHD addled toddler and you are in for a bad time. Pretty often an enemy will run past your squad, firing – or even run through the middle of you, turn round and shoot all of you in the back while your guys steadfastly ignore him. THIS happened a lot as well. It is made all the more irritating by the fact that one of the commonly said phrases in the game is “Watch your sectors!” Nobody watches their sectors. Except me. Also, in these games when they say that, nobody has ever told me where my sector is.

ANYWAY! Back to the linearity. The Chinese army roll in and trounce my guys in about 40 seconds and I’m left holding the place on my own to the point where a bunch of anti-tank soldiers appear and get shot down about 100 meters from my location. As I’m under attack from APCs as well as infantry, I surmise that a mad dash for one of the soldiers’ rocket launchers is called for. I shoulder my M4 and leg it out the compound envisaging myself as a hero. Then the game goes all Kane and Lynch, you know that REALLY shoddy digital corruption look? Yep. Just like that. No, apparently I’m not allowed to be a hero. You WILL stick to the script. Surely in that scenario, the punishment should be that if I mess up, I get killed. It’s not my fault that apparently no one in the United States Marine Corps thought to pack even a LAW.

So let’s look at some positives… No, actually – despite the length of the review already, there are more negatives. I would love to know why (in the name of all that is holy) the Marines are either attacking into the sun or at night. Seriously, you have the sun in your eyes constantly and can hardly see. Just pop a pair of sunglasses on.  It is why the thermal scope is so useful. What else… Oh, yeah – getting stunlocked by enemies. When you get shot, you (quite rightly) recoil in pain (along with more of that lovely Kane and Lynch effect, inexplicably), which leaves you open to another hit which makes you recoil which… Well, you know what stunlock is. That. That happens. Why don’t you call down airstrikes via the map using a coordinates system? Why do you need to use the most UNWIELDY line of sight method? I failed countless secondary objectives due to being a few feet off the precise point I needed to hit.

Oh, GOD! The female pilot’s voice! It is inexplicably recorded twice as loud as every other piece of dialogue and it really grates. Also, early in the game when you will be a maximum of level 6 (if you only play the campaign) DON’T TELL ME TO USE SMOKE GRENADES AND MAKE ME FEEL LIKE A MORON FOR NOT BEING ABLE TO FIND THEM, WHEN THEY AREN’T UNLOCKED UNTIL LEVEL 15! I suppose all these issues are because Codemasters is a very young company and haven’t been making games FOR TWENTY-FIVE YEARS!

When the game hits its stride, and you somehow compensate for all its shortcomings, it is actually pretty decent. The guns feel satisfyingly realistic, except that the M16 fires way too slowly and you have the videogame trope that shotguns can only hit something 5 feet away. The RPG and levelling system is quite engrossing, but it is never made entirely clear where it actually is, so it might take you a few levels to discover it. The game does come into its own in co-op, but in order to see who your friends are, you need to play on Normal, but the level of feedback you get makes the screen an unbelievable mess, with little flags, names, a radar, compass and objective markers. To be fair, the Fire Team Exercises are pretty good fun and work far better than the campaign. It’s not often that I’ll laud a lack of character in a videogame, but Red River is one of those times.

Achievement wise the game is a total grind, demanding the equivalent of over 4 playthroughs, but that won’t happen for me due to a terrible incident. I had been playing one of the FTEs for the 6th time (the Last Stand in the dark if you’re interested) when (for the sixth time) my squadmates just let the enemy in, despite setting all three of them to cover one side while I covered the other. I’m afraid, dear reader, that I lost the plot. I went radgie. It was a quiet rage as my friend who was in private chat with me will attest. To my shame, I removed the disk from the tray and snapped it into four neat quarters. One for each jellyheaded member of Bravo team.