Graphics

Op Flash 2’s visual quality is nowhere near that of the videos and screenshots previously advertised. The models are okay, lighting is good, but the textures are terrible quality and the palette is the same old, washed out “gritty and realistic” look. Only this time, everything is also covered in muddy sprite-smoke, an incredibly ugly depth of field effect, or both. Though this is true of most other games with so much vegetation, anti-aliasing is pretty much required to smooth out all of the jaggy grass, bush, and tree sprites. To top it off, there are pretty much no post-processing or shader effects, so it looks like it’s 2005 again.

The bright side of all this is that it runs very good. As evidenced by the minimum requirements (7600 GT or X1800 XL) it isn’t very demanding, so if you have modern hardware, it’s easy to get really smooth framerates on the highest settings.

Sound

This game’s sound effects are fantastic. Weapons sound great, except when several machineguns fire at almost exactly the same time and get that weird echoey amplification effect. Bullets whiz past you and thump into the ground, mortar explosions that came just a bit too close will rattle you, and your pounding pulse tells you when you’re tired. You hear a single casing hit the floor, punctuating your kill. Switch weapons or equipment and you hear the zippers and shuffling around on your person. Even footsteps on various types of surfaces sound so right.

The voiceovers are average quality, mostly you listen to your commanding officer barking orders through the radio and your character responding and relaying them to the squad. That’s about as far as the story goes – the rest is just a bunch of short words or phrases linked together to form commands or for calling out targets. The result is a dynamic system technically capable of saying a lot of things, but it often sounds incongruent or even robotic, particularly when enemy locations are repeated over and over. Be prepared to listen closely and be annoyed if you’re playing on hardcore mode.