Operation: Desert City

Simply making a first-person shooter nowadays is not a viable business tactic, because there are thousands of them out there, some of which had budgets of millions of dollars. Hence, you need to bring something new to the scene, otherwise no one is going to pay attention to your game. On the other hand, new means innovative, and it’s a lot harder to innovate than it is to copy something that already exists.

Operation: Desert City is not the kind of shooter that changes the face of the industry, but then again it wasn’t designed to be that anyway. Instead, it’s merely a learning project that allowed the developer to get familiar with the framework and maybe use it to create something original and a lot more fun in the future. Hence, Operation: Desert City is not much fun unless you never played an FPS before.

To begin with, the levels are narrow and linear, even if sometimes you have multiple directions to pick from. Each road looks almost the same, on the other hand, and there’s nothing unusual waiting for you no matter what you choose to do. Other than that, your role is to shoot indigo enemy soldiers and find access keys to unlock your way further into the brown city devoid of personality.

Your gun can either shoot regular bullets or charge a powerful shot, which can be used to demolish specially designed walls or deal with clusters of enemies. There’s no need to reload or worry about ammunition, because your gun has an infinite supply. Your character is pretty much immortal as well, at least if you duck in time and you wait for the screen to turn back to normal from bright red.

Probably the most engaging thing about the game is the graphics quality, although that’s mostly thanks to Epic and their Unreal Engine 4. The lighting is superb, and so are the materials and the way each texture is rendered. As mentioned before, the level design is not exactly bad, but it’s very linear and repetitive, which hurts the overall experience.

All things considered, Operation: Desert City a pretty polished first project, but it’s not much of an actual game. Hence, we can only hope that the developer uses what he learned here in order to create something original and with better level design.