One day, my friends, I will be able to sit here in front of a realism-craving war FPS and say it’s completely refreshed my rather failing impression of an already overcrowded genre. Heck, Call of Duty 4 would have managed it just fine, but Jay got his grubby paws on the one and left me standing at the station, looking rather forlornly as the train left. We can’t have all the fun, I suppose!

If you are thinking that the above was a way for me to break it to you that Conflict: Denied Ops isn’t a particularly good game, then you’d be wrong. No – the above is a way for me to desperately fill time before telling you that aforementioned game is possibly one of the most depressing experiences I’ve ever had on the modern generation of consoles. It’s freezing cold, it’s Monday morning and to be quite honest I’d rather be getting run over by a bus or stabbed by a tramp, but there’s a job at hand so on we must go.

Denied Ops is the latest in the line of Conflict titles from which we have had a selection of offerings before, although as memory serves none have been particularly recent. They were fair enough titles, too, concentrating on third-person squad antics as their niche of choice and providing a decent slice of entertainment. For some reason, developer Pivotal games decided to move away from this recipe for Denied Ops, instead choosing to reduce the squad members to two and move the viewpoint to the first person.

Things don’t start off in too promising a fashion for the game as soon as it loads. You’re given the standard campaign and multiplayer options, one major plus being the ability to splitscreen co-op the main deal with a chum. Sadly, as time proves, finding a chum willing to sacrifice himself to such an undertaking might prove more than a little tricky.

So what are the issues, then? How long have you got, dear chap? The first thing to strike you is that the characters – messrs Lang and Graves – are two of the most stereotypical, hackneyed war film characters you could ever possibly wish to come across. The former is a mouthy, ego-tripping young gun from the streets who acts as your standard loose cannon. On the flipside, Graves is a gnarled, no-nonsense veteran who is more action than mouth and who – revelation of revelations – enjoys a somewhat edgy relationship with his shooting partner. It’s all horribly predictable, and to make things worse both Graves and Lang are never developed in any meaningful way and generally come across as your token oddball couple. Fun.

The story in which these two complete non-entities are cast is equally clichéd, involving some kind of arms smuggling racket that enables the Americans to shoot people from their Who’s Who catalogue of previous foes such as Middle Eastern terrorists and Russians. I would go into more detail if I could, but to be absolutely honest with you folks I turned off pretty much around the time our commander used the phrase ‘as sure as a Mule spits’ so most of the plot nuances passed me by. One thing’s for sure though: an award winner it isn’t.

Still, a plot lodged deep in Corn City need not cripple a game on its own, as Gears of War ably showed. If the rest of Denied Ops had been half decent then it would have been possible to forget and forgive, but unfortunately the bad news just keeps coming as soon as you actually try to put aforementioned grievances to one side and play the thing.

The first level kicks off with you taking control of your ‘dynamic’ duo – between which you can swap at the press of a button – as they are dropped off in some sort of rocky mountain range. Combat pretty much kicks off instantly, and it’s as soon as it does that you become aware of two major issues with the game that never go away.

The first, most annoying, thing is that your opposition AI are disastrously stupid, running into your line of fire, taking cover behind… well, nothing and standing around gormlessly while you stroll right up to them and smash them with the butt of your gun. It’s the kind of stuff that you’d quite happily accept on a rose-tinted run through GoldenEye now and again, but in a day and age where we have games that have enemies ducking, diving and hiding as if they actually feared for their lives it is crushingly disappointing to say the least. To say it harms the sense of realism a little is akin to saying that getting hit in the face with a hammer might hurt a tiny bit.

Frustratingly, when you come to actually trying to put these goons out of their misery you find that it’s all rather haphazard, with your enemies sporting carbon fibre chests that allow them to take not one, not two but three sniper shots to their body and still act as if they are fresh as the proverbial daisy. On top of this, headshots occasionally don’t even register or have opposing soldiers react as if a fly had just landed on their bonce, making for some really rather unfair deaths. It’s quite common to find yourself running around a corner and filling enemy soldiers with so much lead that they should turn into a pencil, only for them to somehow resist it all and kill you, which then leads to you discovering that the checkpoint system is rather unbalanced and can leave you with up to 15-minutes of backtracking to do. Best have those anger management courses lined up, eh?

One of the supposed key mechanics of Denied Ops is this ability to switch between Graves, your average sniper type, and Lang, more of a hand-to-hand skirmish kind of bloke, thus giving you an element of choice as to whether you want to go sneaky or ballistic. The problem is that at no point in proceedings do you ever feel like one route or the other is substantially different; sniping an enemy often alerts his chums in any case, meaning that close quarters stuff is unavoidable. Far from being a somewhat tactical affair you’ll find yourself blatting through the levels as whichever character you want, and to be frank doing it either way results in a very similar gameplay experience.

By now most sane people would have turned the thing off or smashed their head against a wall to alleviate the pain of having to play something so startlingly below average, yet for those mad enough to want to subject themselves to more of the same there are more problems waiting to crop up. The game box proudly boasts that Denied Ops has ‘massively destructible environments’ and to a degree that’s true, but when you see, amongst other things, statues breaking in exactly the same manner no matter where you shoot them and bookshelves exploding into a shower of dust upon you merely walking into them, it really rather takes the shine off things.

Not that there’s much shine in the first place, now I come to mention it. Graphically, the game looks like it’s turned up for a fashion parade wearing 2004’s clothing, with horridly outdated textures, poor character models and basic (and that’s being generous) lighting effects. The audio side of things does very little to remedy the situation, with cringe worthy voice acting once more giving us the situation where Russian soldiers curiously converse in pigeon English whilst yelling that they are going to kill us instead of conversing with their countrymen in their mother tongue, which I suppose could go some way to explaining their sense of tactics or intelligence. The gun sounds are rather weak too, leading to the illusion that you are engaging in some large-scale peashooter warfare rather than the real thing.

It really crushes your spirit playing through the thing, as horrible as that may sound. It just feels so outdated, so clunky that you can’t even say it’s better than anything on the previous generations of console in terms of how it plays or how it looks, which is not the greatest of situations to find yourself in come 2008. To say it’s first-person shooting by the numbers is, quite frankly, doing an injustice to the numbers (whatever they may be) – Denied Ops is a game that practically rots away the more you play. It’s solid, sure, but when the biggest positive you can take out of a game is that it doesn’t crash or seem to have any major game-breaking bugs you know you’re in trouble.

For what it’s worth, the multiplayer effort is reasonable enough in splitscreen (for the time that Jay was willing to play it, which was approximately 10 minutes), and I am sure the online mode is better fun than I managed to have with it simply due to the fact that when I attempted it, but one poor sod was hanging around looking for a game. PNBChris, you have my respect, and my condolences. With the possibility for 16-person battling across ranked or unranked territory or classic frag matches available should there be enough players hanging around, you could take the positive route and imagine it can only get better. Yeah, tell you what, let’s take the positive route – if only for my sanity.

So apologies folks for dampening your Monday a little further, but let this be a helpful cash-saver for you. With Devil May Cry 4 and Turok out on the same day (reviews inbound!), there’s really no need whatsoever to even consider Conflict: Denied Ops as a viable purchase. For those who are, tuck that £40 safely away in your wallet and rest peacefully in the knowledge that you’ve just saved yourself a mild case of depression and a possible case of stress-related illness. Five years ago this would have seemed reasonable, but in today’s world there’s no place for games like this anymore.