[OFP] Wrestling with the Bear by Sui

Review by Bremmer

Overall

(Review Date: Apr 2002) Wrestling the Bear is a mission by OPFEC moderator and all-round editor par excellence Sui. With those credentials I was expecting nothing less than a work of art … and I wasn’t disappointed.

I’m going to break with tradition and not bore you with ‘the overview is like this’ and ‘the briefing is like that’, instead I will tell you up front that this mission is a master class for any aspiring authors out there. It has a good story line that is developed in depth, a realistic mission objective with adequate support, it even has good characterisation! There are lengthy cut scenes that develop the story, but good use of automatic retry positions means you won’t have to sit through them time and time again. There are lots of nice touches (such as your commander calling you by your real name) and some excellent scripting.

Flaws? Yes there are some. There are elements in here that the player might struggle to get to grips with. Some of the AI could do with a tweak, and overall the level of difficulty is quite low. On such a polished piece of work I was also surprised to find that there was no outro.

These problems are more than outweighed by overall quality, quality that reminded me of some of the best BIS missions (Ambush sprung immediately to mind). Only one thing stops me from giving this a nine – the lack of a custom voice over. With that in place I have no doubts that this would be the best combat mission on OFPEC's books just now.

What are you waiting for? Grab it now!