The thought of working on Conflict: Denied Ops makes us depressed. Imagine it: you go into work every day for about a year, and know, deep down, that the game you’re working on is garbage. There’s no reason for it to be. It has zero innovation and the gameplay is barely average, while the graphics are absolutely hideous in the context of the competition. This should give you an idea of the apathy on offer, with this failed revival of the last-gen series. Conflict: Denied Ops is certainly playable, but this plus point, if you want to call it that, really is the greatest praise we can level at it.

Well, maybe that’s a little harsh. Conflict: Denied Ops drops the third-person tactical nonsense of the PS2 games, and focuses on a two-man co-operative format. Within this, the game is a mixture of GRAW 2 and Call Of Duty 4, but is nowhere near as good as either. The only distinction of Conflict: Denied Ops is the mission structure, which divides into three separate campaigns after the first mission is completed. Whichever path you choose, though, it still leads to a primitive set of clichéd objectives – you protect military men, blow something up, or merely track a wanted man. Whatever your goal, Conflict: Denied Ops is humiliatingly bland. The experience is almost entirely a retread of better games from the past two years: the influences are numerous, but none of them are really used properly.

Conflict: Denied Ops is only a bit messy in basic gameplay terms, however. Although the shooting is imprecise, the game holds up fairly well as a Call Of Duty clone, even though the weapons are crushingly unimaginative. Vehicle sections are implemented to add variety, but the controls are beyond clunky. Why didn’t the developer imitate the Half-Life 2 approach to vehicles, which works very effectively? Conflict: Denied Ops can do no right.

The graphics are appalling, as well. Conflict: Denied Ops looks like a late-in-theday PlayStation 2 game, but there are no decent design touches that make up for it. The game is badly devoid of any passion, to the point where you actually question why it was even commissioned. Conflict: Denied Ops is a real waste of everyone’s time and resources, and nobody needs to even sample this.

We don’t even recommend downloading a demo of Conflict, just to see how bad it is. There are so many FPSs that deserve attention over this, so we suggest you avoid it unless you really are out of games to play. We’re not going to give Conflict another thought, such is the lack of creativity on offer. Let this franchise die, please.

Samuel Roberts