Think of the Conflict series and you immediately conjure up an image of a rock-hard squadbased tactical shooter – or at least we do. There’s been many an hour we’ve spent on those games, inching our group of soldiers forwards in a nervy, piecemeal fashion, only for a hidden sniper to make mincemeat of our squad in a matter of seconds. But that toughness was all part of the series’ appeal – and it was incredibly satisfying when you did manage to keep your team alive.

So if you’re coming to Denied Ops with any similar preconceptions, then it’s probably best to chuck them out of the nearest window, because Pivotal’s latest is far closer to Eidos’ recent Kane & Lynch: Dead Men than any previous game in the series. Indeed, the game was initially called Crossfire before some bright spark at Eidos decided it needed some brand recognition. But all this will do is irritate fans of the older games while confusing those who come to this wondering what all the fuss is about.

Lincoln Graves and Reggie Lang are members of the Special Activities Division of the CIA – in other words, they’re the men the government send in when they don’t want to get their hands dirty; their missions being the denied operations of the title. Quite why anyone would team these two up is entirely beyond us, because right from the off the pair take an instant dislike to each other – oldstager Graves constantly refers to the hot-headed Lang as ‘rookie’ or ‘junior’ while Lang (a poor-quality facsimile of Gears’ Cole Train) frequently makes jibes at Graves’ age, with the odd unnecessary profanity thrown in for good measure. This banter soon becomes more irritating than anything else, though – like almost every other aspect of the game – it seems half-baked, neither protagonist prepared to put any serious venom behind their sniping.

It sums up the game as a whole – the story will pass most players by as it’s the flimsiest of plots to simply tie the stages together. The reasons behind the duo’s jet-setting exploits are tenuous at best, as they chase down some suitcase nukes, and eventually the Venezuelan despot responsible for the game’s fairly vague terrorist threat. You’ll take in a ruined monastery, a chemical tanker in the Antarctic, a small Rwandan township and a castle in Siberia, but the object is essentially identical each time – go in, take out the bad guys, perform one or two secondary tasks and evacuate.

That so many stages conclude with a simple ‘secure the landing zone’ section, shows just how uninspired the missions are. Level design is entirely linear and mostly generic, while the enemy are simply nameless goons attempting to shoot your face off. There’s very little genuine motivation for anything, and this laziness spreads throughout the whole game. The player-swap mechanic just seems like a dumbed-down version of the strategy element of previous Conflict games, and though it’s satisfying to order your partner to hold a position while you flank an enemy, it’s all been done before – and in much more enjoyable fashion, too. Meanwhile, the friendly AI is totally erratic – your partner will often take out a small group of enemies with unerring accuracy, before standing still and letting an onrushing baddie rearrange their face with a rifle butt. Naturally, you have to keep both Graves and Lang alive, so administering a life-saving shot of adrenaline (another nod to K&L) is an essential component of team play. In one of many tiny annoyances, this animation seems to take forever – even more irritating given your partner’s propensity for dropping in open ground with fire still raining in on all sides. With the game’s fairly unforgiving difficulty, you’ll be seeing the Mission Over screen quite a lot – at least the game’s checkpoints are sensibly placed. Well, most of the time.

Though everything moves smoothly, the graphics are mediocre at best, with Graves in particular one of the worstlooking current-gen character models we’ve seen – unless he really was modelled on someone with a severe disability. The game’s sound effects are reasonably solid, while the Richard Jacques score is suitably bombastic, if pretty repetitive. One or two moments of inspiration show what the game could have been – an explosive firefight on an oil refinery and a tough surrounded-onall- sides siege in an abandoned quarry are highlights. But they’re too few and far between in a game littered with clichés like warehouses, smashable crates and that old chestnut, the exploding barrel.

Conflict: Denied Ops is rarely a bad game, it’s just incredibly, moralesappingly average. It’s a game lacking any sense of identity, which at least its stablemate Kane & Lynch: Dead Men could lay claim to. It’s the kind of game you’ll play to completion, then instantly forget about it a month later. And on a console that hosts a number of topquality FPSs, such a tired effort just doesn’t cut the mustard any more.

Chris Schilling