ArmA II Review

Are you a time-poor career-focused go-getter? Does your busy modern lifestyle make it difficult to fit in activities like reciting Anglo-Saxon epic poetry, shaving mammoths, and reading lengthy game reviews? If the answer's 'yes' I've got just the thing for you. RCEFOFTTs are Reviews Constructed Entirely From Official Forum Thread Titles. They're brief; they're pithy; they melt in your mouth not in your hand. Here's one for ArmA II, the latest compendious soldier sim from Operation Flashpoint creator Bohemia Interactive Studio:

"Awesome moments. This is real war. Give the AI a medal! The campaign - absolutely incredible! So atmospheric. Landscape almost real. I killed a rabbit! Thank you so much BIS. Heaps of bugs. Buy this game."

BIS does indeed deserve our gratitude. In Chernarus, ArmA II's Georgia-meets-Yugoslavia-meets-Czechoslovakia setting, it's created a seamless battle venue bigger, more beautiful, and more believable than any you care to mention. In the game's staggeringly well-equipped armoury, it's provided dozens of ways to travel around that venue and slay its nastier inhabitants. And, perhaps most significantly of all, in Operation Harvest Red, it's created a single-player campaign that doesn't suck osel varlata. (Look it up in a Chernarussian phrasebook.)

Where the first game cast the player as an insignificant squaddy swept along leaf-like in a military maelstrom, the sequel takes its campaign lead from the far cosier Queen's Gambit add-on. This time you're somebody - Cooper, one of a five-man US Marine Corps recon unit important enough to have its own manly codename. Team Razor isn't the sort of outfit that spends its time guarding ammo dumps, distributing candy, or digging latrine ditches. They are the lads that are sent in to satchel-charge comms centres on the eve of US invasions of collapsing East European states, the people men with cigars and buzzcuts summon when they need a fleeing war criminal apprehended or a gang of dastardly gun-runners liquidated. These are men held in such high regard they even have their own personal reconnaissance UAV and on-call helicopter taxi.

Z, S, Q, and E. My favourite keys in an ArmA II gunfight.

Sykes, Rodriguez, O'Hara, Cooper and Miles won't be winning any Most Rounded Game Character awards, but they do banter fairly fluently, and have sufficient skill, nous and firepower to make themselves useful in combat situations. Glancing left or right in the middle of a skirmish to see Sykesy lining up shots with his DMR sniper rifle or Rodriguezy blazing away with his chunky MK48 LMG, it's impossible not to feel a little glow of camaraderie. The sense of comradeship is magnified by the new first-aid system. Stop a bullet and often the only thing between you and an armchair in Valhalla is the timely intervention of a mate with a med-kit. Naturally, the lifesaving works both ways. There's nothing like darting from cover, grabbing a wounded buddy by the scruff of the neck and then hauling him back through a hail of lead, to make you feel good about yourself.

Not only does the campaign cast you in an attractively heroic (but not unbelievably so) role, and provide an intriguing plot, it allows you, later on at least, to write big chunks of your own script. Early outings involve some limited chin-scratching: do you want to escort this civilian to a safehouse in the woods, or help a pinned-down platoon eliminate a sniper? As the campaign matures, the freedom expands and semi-random encounters become increasingly common. Before you know it you're standing in a tent in a Forward Base listening to a commander deliver a speech that basically boils down to 'Why don't you guys spend a few days exploring the local countryside, quizzing locals, shooting insurgents, and joining in any random skirmishes you happen to come across?' It's Oblivion with assault rifles.

The Osprey, named for its hovering ability rather than its fish catching prowess.

Or it would be if the NPCs were a little more talkative and the polish had been applied with a tad more elbow grease. Right now the creakiest aspect of the code is the campaign scripting. Play for a few hours and you'll almost certainly encounter a faulty trigger or a baffling impasse. Example: in my last session, me and the Razors were belting along a country road in a commandeered hatchback (our usual ride, a LAV-25, having been lost in an unfortunate contretemps with a T-72 tank) when we heard over the radio that a friendly helo had gone down nearby. Could we help rescue the survivors? You bet we could! But no sooner had I turned the car round a message came through saying the mission had ended in failure. Huh?

Another time, we choppered out to a village to snatch a war-crimes suspect and on arrival found the geezer dead as a doornail, obviously executed by one of the others five factions in the tangled civil war. Logically this discovery should have meant the relevant task was ticked off our 'To Do' list, but no, it stubbornly remained unticked. Were we meant to search the corpse or report the death to the base CO? Neither action did the trick.

Campaign progress can also be frustrated by crashes - the kind that happen when the game decides it doesn't like a particular save-game (rare but annoying), and the kind that happen when your halfwit helo chauffeur decides he's going to fly his bird straight into an electricity pylon or a pine tree (more common). AI motorists and pilots are as clumsy as they were in ArmA. You have to separate men from their vehicles, and stick a weapon in their hands to see any signs of IQ improvement. The much-vaunted Micro AI manifests itself in combatants sensibly keen on cover and generous with suppressive fire. Now, if only BIS could get bots to fully exploit buildings, play possum occasionally, and perform the odd banzai charge.

Half the joy of a BIS game is rummaging through the mountain of kill kit. The best way to trial aircraft, AFVs or firearms remains the fantastically friendly, amazingly powerful editor. A few clicks and you're flying a V-22 Osprey through a wall of flak, infiltrating an enemy base as a wild boar (civilians and animals are playable), or watching the dogfight to end all dogfights. Armoury mode makes you works a little harder for your hardware fun. Success in mini-challenges gradually unlocks the full range of gadgets and units. Complete an obstacle course, eliminate an enemy patrol, shoot a set number of clay pigeons... it's OpFlash the way PopCap would do it. A few of the tasks are criminally silly (I'm thinking specifically of the one where you play a poacher-avoiding rooster) but in a game as gritty and gruelling as ArmA II a bit of levity doesn't hurt.

And make no mistake, ArmA II has grit and gruel by the lorry-load. Where other shooty games DHL targets to your door, this one makes you search high and low for them (most of the campaign is spent travelling hopefully rather than arriving). Where other FPSs keep your crosshairs rock-steady and your view unobstructed, here bad posture, tiredness, fear and foliage transform gunnery from a science into a dark art. It's the difference between playing COD4 on your desktop rig at home, and playing it on a laptop while running through a wet forest being chased by Alsatians. Initially exasperating, massively satisfying once you get the hang of it.

. Time to steal a car, bus, lorry, tractor, motorbike, mountain bike, jeep, tank, or sturdy goat.

That unapologetic realism, combined with high headcounts, huge maps, and splendid opportunities for joint ops, means ArmA II is sure to replace its predecessor as the MP weapon of choice for the discerning infantry simmer. For those passionate about vehicular verisimilitude, there are fewer reasons for loyalty. While the planes and armour all look the part and are mostly a doddle to operate, under the skin the modelling hasn't moved on since OpFlash days. Tanks with hitpoints that can be whittled down by sustained small-arms fire, vehicles with no 3D interiors, aircraft that come without even crude representations of radar... if ArmA 3 doesn't address some of these shortcomings then the natives may start getting restless.

And if the inevitable third episode doesn't overhaul the obtuse interface there's also going to be trouble. Veterans will have no difficulty finding what they need amongst the mass of icon-shunning order menus, but newcomers are likely to have some sticky, frustrating moments. The fact that the number keys aren't used to select weapons or team members says a lot about the game's wilfully idiosyncratic approach to control.

Time is yomping on and I still haven't talked of Warfare (a skirmish mode that blends soldiering with RTS base building) the single mission supply (slim but containing gems), or the fact that ArmA II is already being leapt on by an army of talented vehicle-crafting, behaviour-tweaking, mission-authoring modders. I've yet to mention how thrilling it is to skim stunning spruce forests in speeding choppers and gaze down at raging random engagements. There's a thousand more things I could say to justify my hearty recommendation of this incomparably rich war sim. Ultimately though all you really need to bear in mind is the words of that RCEFOFTT: