Reality, if it didn’t suck so much we probably wouldn’t play so many games. Yet there’s a constant unconscious desire to inject more reality into games. The previous Operation Flashpoint game, Dragon Rising, tipped the bar a touch too far presented an excruciatingly difficult military sim. Red River pulls the reality back an inch from ‘military sim’ to ‘tactical shooter’, but don’t expect a cake walk soldier. This is still a game about (imaginary) real soldiers.

It’s often laughably argued that Call of Duty and Bad Company are somehow more ‘realistic’ than games like Halo or Killzone. The weapons, scenarios and settings might be more realistic. But the soldier you play as, be he British SAS or cyborg super soldier, is always fighting in optimum conditions. The sun is always at your back, the enemy are always clearly visible and firefights always make out at an ideal range. These aren’t the conditions of reality, these are exciting thrill rides with movie scenario like settings designed to titillate and empower. Given the sales figures for all four games they achieve this admirably. Not to denigrate them, all four games are great, quality titles I’ve played and enjoyed immensely. But these games are power fantasies made interactive entertainment, as divorced from reality as they can get while remaining believable.

Operation Flashpoint: Red River is different. They line up your power fantasies against a wall with black bags on their heads and blow their brains out.

Pictured, no auto recovering health

The first mistakes you will make, if you’re unfamiliar with this type of game, as I did, is try and play it like Call of Duty. When someone shouts ‘sniper to the west’, you don’t spin around and try to spot him, you throw yourself behind the nearest east facing wall and hope your team follows your lead. Long periods of tense quiet are followed by tiny silhouettes on the horizon, then a whine noise and a puff of dust in front of you followed by a shout, ‘They’ve got our range’, then the next bullet smacks you in the chest and you go down, writhing in agony and bleeding out, gasping for help, which may or may not make it in time. Visibility becomes a huge issue and if you’re stupid enough to approach a target with the sun in your face you deserve to get shot. I spent far too much on the first level firing my precious rounds of ammo at rocks and trees far in the distance. Suddenly all those friendly fire deaths in Afghanistan make a lot more sense.

One day I'll shoot the enemy, with luck

You play as the leader of Bravo Company; one of three fire teams under the command of your Jaime Foxx in Jarhead channelling CO Knox. As a character Knox is perfect, you hate him for his constant antagonising bullshit but you love him for his tactical info and advice. His arrogant ’10 rules for survival’ are incredibly useful, like reloading faster under fire by saving the last round in the chamber. When he talks, you listen. You start the game as a Rifleman and have command of three guys, a grenadier, sniper and an automatic rifleman with the option to play as one of their designations. Your mission is chasing some rascally terrorists into the hills of Tajikistan during an imagined escalation of the Afghanistan war, unfortunately the Chinese PLA are also in Tajikistan and the American and Chinese forces soon cross swords, the PLA proving far more effective that the Taji rebels.

You get attached to your fire team very quickly, especially as the loss of any of them in combat impacts the experience a great deal; without your sniper enemy sharpshooters become a nightmare to track and kill, without your automatic gunner suppressing targets becomes a lot harder.

AIrstrikes in Operation Flashpoint are less 'cinematic marvel' and more 'life sparing godsend'... for you at least

Controlling your team is matter of squad commands issued with the D pad. There are a lot of options but it doesn’t take long to get used to the commands. Before you know it you’ll be sending your sniper to high ground and ordering your grenadier and auto gunner to lay down suppressing fire without even thinking about it. The rest of the controls are simple and easily familiar to anyone who has played a shooter before.

There’s a levelling system where experience points can be used to level up skills and unlock new weapons and pieces of equipment. Most of these are useful to have but none feel particularly game altering. It’s developing and improving the basic skills of the game that are the key to survival, especially at the tougher settings.

Don't expect to see many of your enemies before they start shooting

The difficulty is Red River’s greatest strength and weakness. On the easiest setting the game becomes part war sim and part paniced episode of Greys Anatomy. When you or one of your squad take a bullet you start bleeding out, a meter appears on the screen indicating how long before you’re incapacitated, you need to hold the A button to stop the bleeding (‘stick a tampon in it’ your team mates shout, which in the army they literally do), then hold it again to bandage yourself up. On the easy setting you will spend a lot of time bandaging yourself and your team mates, in some firefights it feels like that’s all you do. On harder settings you don’t have to worry about it so much, cause your dead. The game can be terribly frustrating on these settings, but that’s because it’s supposed to be and while at first it feels like trial and error gameplay, you do learn to play cautiously. It can even feel a little liberating playing at the harder settings, you’ve got no HUD and no onscreen markers, when your CO says call on air strike on that building to the north, you need to really look for what he’s talking about. There’s zero hand holding, and zero margin for error, and that can feel kind of cool.

Clean and sweep, dust the decks, wipe down mirrors, load the dishwasher, all of these are probably military terms

An issue returning fans of Dragon Rising may have is that the capacity to explore and tackle objectives is a lot more limited in Red River. It’s one the reasons the sequel leans towards more shooter status that strategy status than its predecessor. There’s still a huge draw distance and the game is still a ‘long range’ title but levels are more A to B. Your path is usually straight ahead of you and while this means less exploration, it does mean more action, so there is a payoff there. Later levels begin to open things up a little as well as more time is spent on foot and less being ferried about in hum vees.

The game runs of Codemasters own EGO engine which powers race titles such as the Dirt series and a few recent Formula 1 titles. Strangely, despite this automotive pedigree, the vehicle sections in Red River look a bit lame, for a game that strives towards immersing you in reality it really takes you out of it when you watch you and your squad run towards the hum vee and then magically warp into the passenger seats next to Knox. There are a few other rough edges to the graphics, textures sometimes look far rougher than they should and animations fail miserably, team mates and enemies walk sideways or move from a stand to a prone position using the aforementioned warp magic, the required animation missing from the process. Red River is just over all lacking some polish in terms of graphics, issues present in Dragon Rising keep cropping up despite Red River’s more restrictive options for exploring. The game does much better in the ear department; both sound effects and dialogue are excellent.

I got him sarge I got him... no wait, it's another tree, just a tree everyone

The multiplayer for Red River is a bittersweet experience. Sweet because hot damn it makes for a fantastic coop game, one of those real bonding experience coop games full of the best kind of moments you can get from a multiplayer game. When you see a mate go down and your torn between scrambling to try and save him before he bleeds out or protecting your other mates by trying to take out the shooter, that’s the kind of experience multiplayer games should be made of. Even better is playing the harder HUDless difficulties where you need to rely on your own communication just to survive. The bitter part comes from the fact the game is a pretty niche title and finding other people to play with can be a bit tricky, let alone finding a full game with three people. You will often have lag issues from playing with people on the other side of the world. There’s no adversarial mode either which is a bummer.

People might think they want reality, but when faced with reality, it might not be the reality they thought they really wanted (right?). Red River isn’t for people who like striding through battlefields like Robocop picking of hundreds of enemies at a time. Red River is for people who love the tension, fear and chaotic uncertainty that actual combat is like. The old phrase is, I think, that combat is 70% boredom, 10% fighting and 20% abject terror. Red River plays with the ratio a bit to keep things engaging, but gets closer to the actual experience than most so called ‘military shooters’ ever could. If they could just polish up some of those rough development edges and get the game looking a little better Codemasters would have a truly epic war game on their hands. Red River is not a game for people who want to feel like a badass, it’s a game for people who want to know what it takes to be a badass.