[OFP] Breaking and Entering by Devilchaser

Review by Archangel Scream

Overview

The Overview attempts no picture and makes do with just a title and couple of lines of text.

Intro

There is a long intro with some nice advanced scripting involved. There's a somewhat pointless burst of the finale to "O Fortuna Velut Luna" from Carmina Burana (the "Old Spice" music if you're an under-cultured 25+ years).

Briefing

A fairly basic briefing with one simple attack objective.

Mission

After some more cutscene work, the mission itself: The plot moves around attacking and then holding Chapoi - and you're going to do this as the gunner on one of three M2A2s, with infantry support. There's no choice of weapons here, but let's face it, the M2A2 is probably the most fun West vehicle to gun, with its TOW missiles and HE cannon on top of the MG. You know there's fun to be had with them.

And if you find your armour crippled by RPG soldiers, and you don’t like using the XMS rifle, then it's simply a case of finding a dead West soldier - they're all toting a G36 or Steyr.

The mission itself is a huge file - 10.3 megs - and surprisingly, it's all custom music only, mainly extracts from the "Outlaw Star Soundtrack". And if Vietnam was a Rock'n'Roll war, then Devilchaser here has created a "Pop Song Mission".

Music is always going to be a matter of taste, but I personally found it somewhat outdated sounding and a little off-putting. Think late 70's early 80's film pop and then add the Bradley engine and weapons fire over the top. Somewhat bizarre. In fact, there's something about the sounds that simply hints at an experiment in using custom music, as well as the clear stated aim of showcasing the units from the 1.30 upgrade.

The mission itself plays fine enough - as a gunner you can feel smug within the armour most of the time. There's a slight lull at the form up point, but as you've already encountered some token resistance and seen the infantry following up, you know it won’t be long before you're moving on again.

As a gunner one main limitation is that you're at the mercy of your driver's motions, so sometimes you'll experience much more action than at other plays, while clearing Chapoi during a drive around the perimeter.

Then there's the Soviet counter-attack after, and it's hard to stay safe - it's almost inevitable you'll find your M2A2 crippled by fire from either BMP 2s or the RPG soldiers themselves, and so it's straight to the ground for cover. But the infantry support sweeping through will take care of most things after, especially as the West armour (which includes M113's in support also) will have cut a swathe in the enemy advance.

There can be problems then of finishing the mission - the end trigger is much too over generous, and there's a danger of spending too time in the mission looking for that last enemy unit. But a sweep through the town itself to check for stragglers from the assault, or else up the road to where the enemy reinforcements arrived from, soon locates that last annoying and cowardly Soviet.

Overall

(Review Date: May 2002) Generally, this is a competent mission, but it fails to carry any real ambition aside from with the intro cutscene work. The music could have added an interesting dimension to play but instead sits perhaps uncomfortably - especially considering the almost crippling file size and associated download time required for modem users. The mission itself has a nice build-up and is generally alright, but it offers nothing particularly different and there's no real imaginative tweaks - the lack of an outro win scene also fails to build on an attempt at plot in the intro.

A competent mission, but nothing outstanding, with an unwieldy file size to boot.