This isn’t Hollywood, soldier! This is war! Two short sharp sentences that pretty much sums up Codemasters’ upcoming realistic shooter, Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising. The sequel to the still popular Operation Flashpoint looks to bring a realistic shooter to consoles for possibly the first time. Codemasters Executive Produce Sion Lenton was on hand at E3 to run us through a short mission taking place off the main isle of Skira with the objective of taking down a radar tower blocking signals preventing the use of heavy artillery support.

A bit of background first; the island of Skira is 220 square kilometres with a whole array of different terrains ... all of which are accessible by you, the player. Operation Flashpoint gives you access to over 60 different weapons and 30 vehicles you can get behind the wheel of, from jeeps to jets. The title is 4 player co-op enabled but doesn’t support drop in and drop out support due to technical limitations ... we presume because of the vast scale of the environment. Seriously, it’s absolutely huge. Expect fully destructible buildings and persistent damage in a sandbox environment that lets you do what you want.

You play the part as a soldier, not a John Rambo style soldier ... try that here and you won’t be successful, just a normal every day soldier. You’re essentially a cog in a much larger machine. As Lenton makes his way up a hill towards the radar station with his crew of 3 accompanying soldiers, the realism aspect is clear as day. Combat techniques like suppression and flanking enemies are pretty much a necessity if you’re going to survive, as is teamwork. Making use of the in-depth command system with the AI soldiers is the key to success. As Lenton sends his crew to the right of an enemy post ordering them to suppress, and hold position, it enables him to flank the enemy post to get a clear line of sight. Everything is at your fingertips; from ordering your troops to ambush with heavy weapons to changing their rules of engagement.

As far as health goes in Dragon Rising, there is no regenerative health per se. You have 8 pints of blood and if you take a wound, you’ve got to plug that gap before you lose it all. There are no magic heals here, if you take a bullet to the leg, expect it to affect movement, if you take a bullet to the arm, expect it to affect weapon accuracy, and if you take a bullet to the head, expect to die. It’s as simple as that. Of course you can have medics in your squad to heal you, but can you afford to sacrifice that much firepower?

Most of the combat in Dragon Rising is long range engagement and it’ll be very rare you’ll get into a face to face firefight. Because of the open nature of the world, the enemy AI is pretty autonomous and sophisticated. This isn’t a corridor shooter, so no scripted moments; the opposition troops have to react to every situation through threat assessment and the game even adopts a morale system, so if you put a lot of pressure of a small band of men, expect them to cut their losses and retreat. Unfortunately for the enemies on the command post, Lenton flanks them and takes them down before they even have a chance to do that.

A quick word about difficulty levels. The difficulty levels in Dragon Rising don’t actually change the world itself; the AI remains the same throughout and what it does is changes the user feedback. So if you crank it up to 11 on the hardest difficulty; you’ll lose the cross hair, the direction of fire indicator and you’ll downed troops will stay down when they’re dead. Approaching the command post now, toggling a checkpoint on at the top of the hill, Lenton and his troops can get chance to regroup, stock up on ammo, and change weapons before moving on to take out the radar station.