"Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis" (OFP) is a tactical shooter and battlefield simulator game released in 2001. Set on a group of fictitious islands in the year 1985, Operation Flashpoint (OFP) puts the player on one of three sides in a hypothetical conflict between the NATO and Soviet forces led by a renegade general. The Resistance, which generally sides with NATO, is the third playable faction. Two expansion packs were released; Gold Upgrade (which included 'Red Hammer', a campaign from the Soviet perspective), and Resistance, which introduced various new features and improved the graphic and sound effects. The main feature of the game is its close attention to realism.
A server host has the ability to choose cooperative multiplayer missions where a team of human players fight together to accomplish specific objectives, as well as the player-devised Conquer The Island (CTI) mode where two teams of human players, or alternatively one team of humans and one team controlled by AI, have the ability to build their own bases complete with basic defences, train AI infantry units, build empty or AI-crewed vehicles and clash in large-scale battles.
Operation Flashpoint also includes an in-game mission editor which can be used to create anything from simple missions (with some practice and/or by using some of the extra tools that are available on the web) to professional campaigns complete with custom music and voice and advanced triggers and waypoints which greatly reinforce the smoothness of a mission and the intelligent activity of the AI.
Most missions are heavily scripted but take place in a large game world. The game world doesn't consist of maps as most do, rather the events happen on open islands. These islands are large; if you attempted to travel from one end to the other on foot it would take well over two hours, depending on the island and person. Also, the game is not played on individual maps, but on one single map, albeit with different scripting. This means that the player can go to where he started on the last mission from your current one.
The original OFP version's three main islands are based on actual existing islands. Kolgujev is based on Tenerife Island, one of the Canary Islands. Everon is the Croatian Island of Krk. Malden is the Greek Ionian island, Levkas. OFP's desert Island is Meganissi, the largest island just to the east of Levkas. Although the island of Nogova itself, found in the expansion pack Resistance, has no real world analogue, it shares landmark names with Bohemia Interactive's native Czech Republic and several areas appear to be very similar to areas in the game."
Operation Flashpoint features dozens of guns and vehicles, and pioneered the use of realistic vehicle and aircraft combat in FPS games. While Operation Flashpoint cannot provide the same level of vehicle realism as a dedicated tank or flight sim like Steel Beasts, or Falcon 4.0, it is nevertheless impressive because it is both able to simulate aircraft, tank and infantry combat with higher levels of realism than other games in its class, and also accurately simulate the complex relationships between these elements in wartime, (i.e. combined arms). Wikipedia
