[OFP] BAS Delta/Ranger Woodland Demo by Asmodeus

Review by Calamity

Overview

Good Picture. Nice high-res snapshot, with border, which has been taken from the Intro. It also has some text relevant to the mission.

Intro

The Intro is a two-parter. The first part is a little action sequence; the second part is an introduction to the units from DeRa 1.55. On the whole, the Intro has some serious WOW factors! First, I love the music selection. Custom music is always good. Metallica is always better! The author uses custom frames and has placed some credits information on the bottom frame member. Very professional! He also makes good use of the SetAccTime function to increase the dramatic effect of the action sequence. There’s an assassination and a short little skirmish. It’s at the end of the action sequence that we encounter one of the few flaws of the mission. The camera zooms in on the destruction, fades out, and then pops back in full before cutting to the DeRa introduction sequence. This timing issue is not serious and doesn’t detract from the intro experience, but a mission of such high caliber should not have this problem. The second part has some slow-motion revolutions around the various DeRa units. Also very professional, this is a demo mission after all…

Briefing

The trend of “Well Done” continues. The Plan section is a bit plain. There’s some text and the objectives. All the links work and the map well documented. It’s the Notes section that starts to stand apart. The first thing you’ll notice is that there’s a picture in the notes. There are also some links that take you to secondary pages. There is a lot of detail, background information, enemy information, and even a weather report!

The Weapons pool is severely limited, only two sniper weapons. As this is a sniper mission, this adheres to the story line. The only thing I noticed, and again it does not detract form the mission, just an oversight I think, the M21’s Magazine pool has 60 mags in it. Even after you’ve given an M21 to yourself and your spotter, and loaded each with a full compliment of M21 mags (Hate to be in enemy territory and run out of ammo!) there are still 40 mags left in the pool! Now, who’s going to use them? Like I said, it’s one of those things only a designer might notice.

Mission

For anyone who has played a BAS Demo mission before, you can tell right from the start that this has been cut from the same cloth. The first thing you get to do upon starting is pick the time of day you want to fight. But the unique BASish thing is that you get a stand-alone pop-up box to do your selection! A real nice touch!

As for the play of the mission, in short: Run to a hill, kill some bad guys, wait for the cavalry, then run to the evac point. That should only take about 20 to 30 minutes! There are some craftily placed units that caused me some surprises. They are in the same place each time, however, which is a Re-playability drawback.

Now, I would take a moment to say that this is the quintessential “Target Rich” environment. I don’t think I played once without consuming my entire ammo load, and then had to go picking the dead!

There were a few disappointments however. There is some radio chatter that is text only. Voices aren’t that hard and a mission of this quality should have had them. It’s not terrible, but knocks a few points off.

Second, from the beginning of the mission the Author allows the player to call the Delta guys. According to the plan you shouldn’t do this until after you’ve taken your second objective. Some triggers and an action menu item would have solved this.

As for the objectives, only once out of 11-12 plays did the target drive away as advertised. And once I even killed everything else but the target! He just stands there in front of the car most of the time. Found out that this is because I always shot the driver of the car before the target got in. The one time he did drive away, I never got a mission failure, and I waited over 15 minutes after he left!

I’ve also lost the entire Delta team without any objective failure notification, or even an alert that they were all dead!

Oh, and my spotter drove me crazy yelling “Chopper XXX yards!” every couple of seconds because the chopper that dropped off the target was flying orbits around the kill zone. There were several times I wanted to shoot him just to shut him up!

So there were some out-of-bounds events that could have been better handled. I didn’t notice them until I tried to break the mission. But at 11-12 plays the mission definitely has re-playability! Then again, I always liked sniper missions…

Outro(s)

Like the Intro, excellent! Again the Author expertly uses the SetAccTime to increase the dramatic effect of the intro. Good camera angles, and again a good music score. Having played so many times, I got to see some interesting permutations of the ending. I recognized that these differences from one viewing to the next were due to the Game's AI not repeating the same actions all the time. But it was interesting in one viewing to see one of the Scuds launch!

Overall

(Review Date: Aug 2004) BAS Delivers again! Asmodeus has been putting out some really good work lately and this is no exception! From Intro to Outro this mission is awesome! I had to search long and hard to find any flaws, and those I could find were few and far between. Most likely, only mission developers will notice them. For the regular player, however, you can’t go wrong by adding this to your mission collection!

All in all, the mission is excellently crafted. The flaws I pointed out will not detract from the experience, and most players wouldn’t notice them unless pointed out. If you stick to the mission profile, you probably won’t even see some of them. There are some re-playability issues that some randomization could have reduced or eliminated. But if you enjoy playing this mission a tenth as much as I did, then you’ll play it at least twice! And that’s worth the download of the addons, which are worth it by themselves!