Conflict: Denied Ops should have been denied its production run. This game is a lesson to show what just doesn’t work in a first-person shooter. The controls, while basic shooter-fare, just feel kind of awkward while in use, especially since you have to worry about the second person that is trudging along with you. You don’t get the standard AI help here; instead you are forced to control him in addition to yourself.

This makes for an aggravating experience when you realize that you’ve been forgetting to press the follow trigger over and over so that this retard will actually follow you around the level rather than just stand at the entrance of it waiting for a command. You will quickly learn how to remedy this, by simply tapping the follow command button constantly in between enemies so that mistake never happens again. This gets to be annoying because not only are you forced to keep doing this, you are treated to the wonderful banter which ensues afterward. Since these two characters can’t stand each other they will of course make snide little comments every time you make them interact. Want to know why these two roughnecks don’t get along? One is white, the other is black. That might be enough to bust out the book of clichés right there, but add to this the fact that the main enemy is some strange Russian who has kidnapped a scientist’s family to force him to carry out his will, and you’ve got a bona-fide encyclopedia of things that the media has beat to death.

The missions are standard run and gun. Go here, shoot this. Go there, do the same. All through this I couldn’t tell if I actually had an ammo limit on any of my weapons or if it was simply unlimited and those ammo boxes I was forced to dig through were just for show. Not that I needed an exorbitant amount of ammo in the first place, as the enemies could easily be picked off with a few shots while they weren’t looking. To illustrate just how bad these enemies would get, here’s a personal experience. I was gunned down in battle because I didn’t notice the magical enemy who had sprung up from the doorway I had already cleared out. I then switched to my second character so that I could run and heal my fallen comrade. I ran down the stairs where the enemy was positioned expecting a flurry of gunfire, only to find that he was standing in the doorway, with his back to me staring at my fallen friend. I walked right up to his back to the point where I could not move forward because I was actually touching him. Yeah, this made it easy to shoot him right in the head but where’s the fun in that?