[OFP] Three Kings by Jezuro

Review by Mikero

Overview

Both words in the title should be capitalized ("Three Kings" and not "Three kings"), and I would personally prefer a list of addon requirements on a second/third page (but I won't hold it against the mission maker since the opinions on it seem to differ), but otherwise I found this to be a very nice overview. The picture was nice, and had a border with a shadow, and clearly showed the three people mentioned in the description, and a second page revealed another bordered picture of the mission maker with contact information and the use of different text colors. I also took note of the custom text on loading the intro. Off to a good start.

Intro

This was a good-but-not-great intro; the author makes use of custom music and sounds, and there is some nice camera work and scripting. The green typewriter text was a nice touch, although I thought having the player read 3 paragraphs of information in the intro was over-doing it. Also, it would've been nice if the characters the player would be using were introduced. Nonetheless, though, this is a solid intro. And once again, I took note of the custom message on loading the intro, and the custom date and time.

Briefing

I saw some spelling errors ("wil" instead of "will", "misile" instead of "missile", "major" instead of "Major" when referring to the rank), and an instance or two where the language could've been improved. Also, I was surprised to find very little reference to the people described in the overview, finding out I was Jason Hartnett by looking at the gear screen. Briefings should be used to reveal the character of important people in the mission, and that was not done here. I did take note, however, of the fact that I was able to choose my own gear, selecting a silenced SR-25 over my default silenced M4. Note to the author: if you're going to put time in military 24 hour format (0445), you don't need to include AM or PM.

Mission

I was pleasantly surprised on starting the mission to see an attractive menu for choosing the difficulty (being the chicken I am, I chose to select the lowest available difficulty, which was "Medium". After choosing my difficulty, I was again pleasantly surprised by radio transmissions (with Czech voices), custom music, and custom text! Very nice. The mission auto-saved when I was dropped off, which was also good, and I found that I had a custom GUI health indicator, which looked very pretty. Small things, though, did pop up. I got an error after reloading the mission one time, and another time I was unable to get into a Ural I needed to get into (the driver never got in either). Also, I thought that the "earning" of save-games after key areas was great. The first half of this mission was spectacular in its use of scripted engagements, player-AI interaction, and just general mood, and was definitely worthy of an 8. The problem was, though, that the further the player got towards the end of the mission, the further the tone of the mission seemed to change more towards a typical OFP mission. For example, at the beginning of the mission you have to avoid some patrols in order to "prevent the other bases from going on alert", but towards the end of the mission you attack one base while a substantial enemy force sits on its hands just over the hill, waiting for you to come and kill them. The fact that you later have to attack that substantial force by yourself was another thing I was not very happy with.

Outro(s)

The outro was pretty much of the same quality of the intro. It was

Special

This mission (and especially the first half of this mission) makes spectacular use of scripted behavior, custom voices, cutscenes, and custom graphics.

Overall

I really can't express how much I wanted to give this an 8. Towards the beginning of the mission, in fact, I was even thinking that it might be 9 material. Unfortunately, though, the mission seemed to lose its high level of carefully crafted experiences the further it went along, until it was playing like a 5 (5 not being bad per se, but not being 8, or even 7 for that matter).

Edit by Walter_E_Kurtz -
This review is for an earlier version (v1.04) - the download has since been updated to v1.06.