James Burgess

For the past few months, I’ve been fiddling around with an excellent tactical shooter – ArmA: Armed Assault. ArmA is the sequel to the fantastic Operation Flashpoint series, and the developers (Bohemia Interactive) have certainly taken the action and the detail up a notch.

Over the years, I’ve played many different shooters, from your classic FPS (say, Half-Life) to your tactical shooters like Ghost Recon – but nothing comes close to the enjoyment I get out of ArmA. Of course, this is going to sound like a fan-boy post, but I don’t care all that much – as this game is brilliant.

Of course, the fun comes from the team-work – without it, it’s relatively mundane and boring. However, you’re not going to find a mission that you can handle by yourself. Forget run-and-gun, forget picking up a heavy machine gun or squad-based weapon and laying round after round into the enemy location – you’ll be dead in mere seconds. This is about tactics, quick thinking, long periods of planning and, often, a good deal of time spent just watching patrols and movements with your binoculars.

I was never a huge fan of your classic FPS, they never challenged me enough. I didn’t want to just get good at so-called ‘twitch’ gaming, as that just got repetitive and boring. In the Battlefield series, my clan-mates and I always used to go on obscure little stealth missions, which would often take us 80% of the round time, but would achieve devastating results – there’s nothing quite like gunning down 20 people from a concealed location and jumping straight to the top of the scorecard. In Counter-Strike it was often the same, I’d end up setting up little ambushes with a few friends, and devastating an entire team in one go. Run-and-gun just never cut it for me.

So, you could say, ArmA is a dream-come-true for me – tactics, careful planning, but still requiring team-work, accuracy and quick thinking. I’m so glad I’ve got it (even if I was very late on the uptake). There are some excellent features that really help the immersion like Direct Communication (where only people within ear-shot hear your voice, for those close-quarters situations), well-implemented bloom (none of this over-the-top glowing, but proper reactions to light), decent net-code and a great weather/environment system.

Here are a few screenshots from the game itself – and I recommend you check out a few reviews, and then grab it for yourself (it’s only about £20 for the Gold pack these days). Do note, though, that most of the issues mentioned in reviews as ‘problems’ have been rectified in patches (e.g. weapon recoil has been totally reworked in the latest beta patch). The graphical problems have also been largely worked out.

I’ll also chuck in this excellent video (a mission-based replication of Black Hawk Down… how could I not!?)

If you need me, I’ll be on the battlefield…

Tags: Reviews, Video

This entry was posted on Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 10:20 and is filed under Gaming, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.