Reviewed by Giwex
Download
Required : Desert Siege, Island Thunder, Patch 1.4
INTRODUCTION
Canadian Operatives 2, Operation Stabilize, No Easy Day..... These are the latest mods released to the GR community and all of them are huge mods, full conversion mods weighing almost 200 Mb and that took more than 1 year of development.
One could be very afraid to try to challenge those monsters of modders with his mod and this is the main reason I never found the bravery to release my mission. Luckily a guy called Militia Man was not so scared and released his small size mod (only 5Mb) called Operation Diablo. The original campaign idea came from -=Ghost=-.
CONTENTS
Operation Diablo consists of a 5 mission campaign mainly based off Island Thunder maps. There is also 1 bonus mission on an extra map (MLP castle) created by LowProfile. This new map adds many kilobytes to the campaign. Without this new map the mod could be surely less than 500 Kb.
There are no new skins or weapons but just a few new kits. It reminded me of some good old mods such as "Free Russia" by AV_Apollo, "12 weeks" by Right-hand or "Rees Pack" by DWilliams11. Similar to these three campaigns, Operation Diablo is not merely several missions put together, but a very well planned setting.
BACKGROUND AND CONCEPT
The campaign is based in Colombia in the year 2002. United States special forces are working in the country to remove problems caused by the drug traffickers. The concept is not new. "Saving Pilot Ryan," by Jack57, was another great modification which was based on this idea. I don't really want to compare the two because they are both very different.
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THE MISSIONS
Missions are quite simple and in general they don't reserve any surprise to the players. They run quite smoothly, until the end, with a low difficulty level. In a few hours you can finish the campaign.
The first thing a veteran GR player could note, apart the absence of any cinematic, is that all the missions remind you of some other missions included in other mods. For example in mission 4, my favorite one, you have to kill a drug lord in a the town with a convoy. (Do you remember "Sniper Nest" in "Frostbite"?)
There are no bugs in the mod except mission 3, where the game CTD when loading a saved game as stated clearly in the readme file. I actually have no idea why this happens.
It should be mentioned that is a lack of details in the campaign such as no briefing world map. There is also no briefing map to give you correspondence between the waypoints and the objectives. These are very simple problems. I'm sorry that many high quality mods from expert modders also do not consider this.
The bonus mission, in my opinion, is the weakest mission because it adds so many megabytes to the mod while it's only a sort of "kill everyone" mission.
CONCLUSION
Last November Militia Man contacted me to test his first mission. It was a very very simple mission with almost no script. Therefore I was astonished when a couple of days ago I realized he was the author of "Operation Diablo." It's surely good news for all the new scripters out there who could be pushed to improve a lot seeing what Militia Man was able to learn in only 2 months.
We are looking forward to your next campaign Militia Man. Why not, a new version 2 of this really good Operation Diablo?!?!
FINAL SCORE: 7.2/10
OBSERVATION
At the end of the mod you could see that Militia Man thanked Jack57 (the teacher of all of us) and me for help with scripting. My help was small and didn't at all affect my review.
Reviewed by Giwex
Edited by Rocky, 01 August 2008 - 07:44 PM.
