ArmA II [PC]
Playing ArmA II is a lot like the pre-credits sequence to the ‘Crime’ episode of Chris Morris’ excellent docu-satire series, Brass Eye. All is calm as Morris explains his position direct to camera. Then suddenly all is noise. Flashing lights. Chaos. Morris running around haphazardly, shouting “crime is confusing! crime is confusing!”
Substitute ‘crime’ for ‘war’ and you’ve got ArmA II. By most accounts actual wartime operations are indeed complete chaos, which suggests a point in favour for this latest military sim from Bohemia Interactive. They’re the developers behind the original Operation Flashpoint, Armed Assault and, now, ArmA II – so they’ve had a lot of practise recreating convincing warzones. But when the confusion of a firefight blends with confusion over user interfaces and function, then there is more of a problem.
Perhaps because they know a lot of players coming to ArmA II will be OpFlash or Armed Assault veterans, the makers have no desire to spell anything out. It might seem odd to say this when the game offers a multi-part Boot Camp tutorial involving everything from helicopter lessons to firing ranges, but the scope of the title is so deep that this can only really brush the surface of what’s possible. The squad training, for example, teaches the basics of command; how to move, regroup, get everybody inside a humvee and so on. But it also merrily waltzes through ten different command menus (which open up even more menus) accessible from 0-9 on the keyboard. These include formations, specialised movements and all the other high-level tactical approaches that seem necessary for a pretty hardcore military simulation. What the tutorial doesn’t (or perhaps simply can’t) do is offer any combat situations where you might be advised to select any of these options. When the time comes to actually command a squad, or indeed multiple squads, first-time players are flying almost completely blind.
That’s the bad confusion. The good confusion is altogether different, though slightly influenced by the former. Laying face down in the grass as bullets crack off nearby twigs and you team-mates call out enemy positions and cry for help from god knows where is good confusion. Dragging your wounded body underneath an APC and wondering whether anybody can reach you before you bleed out is good confusion. Being given on-the-fly tasks as you go about a main objective and not knowing whether they’re worth it, how dangerous they are, and if you can even help in time is good confusion. You will be shot and killed. A lot. By people you never even saw. It’s the chaos of the battlefield and it’s replicated superbly.
A lot of this can be enjoyed in the “Red Harvest” single player campaign, which begins in linear-ish fashion but rapidly goes extremely open-ended. Around about the fourth mission, the whole of Chernarus (the fictional post-Soviet state in which ArmA II sets itself) becomes accessible. From this point onwards it’s almost entirely up to the player which lines of action and investigation to pursue. This is outrageously ambitious on the part of the developers and it’s almost dizzying to realise that you have the the ability to trundle around the country in armoured vehicles, gaze down into villages from wooded hilltops and think ‘I can literally go anywhere now and try to find some action.’
But this mighty ambition also leads to problems. The open-ended nature of the campaign means bugs are almost inevitable – whether they’re mission triggers not working properly or baffling AI behaviour. When the latter takes the form of a rescued doctor taking time out from fleeing an occupied village to do some impromptu breakdancing in the middle of the road, it’s mostly just funny. But when it’s AI members of your own squad behaving like idiotholes (especially when the death of a squad member counts as mission failure) it becomes a little exasperating. Thanks to the confusion and complexity of the game, half the time you’re not even sure how much your own actions were to blame for squad deaths. Should you have given them more accurate commands maybe? Is it your fault that they’re struggling to pathfind their way around some walls? Who knows. War is confusing.
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Other AI characters suffer from similar issues. Let me tell you about Maddox. Maddox is an AI helicopter pilot who does not give one solitary fuck. Lovely flat fields bore Maddox stupid. Maddox likes a challenge. He likes the thrill of bark against helicopter fuselage and the sweet sound of twisting metal. It really is terrific, in a game already as punishing as this one, to see Maddox ineptly bouncing his chopper down a hillside like some kid on a toboggan, when all you really need is a ride home. And as you look down upon his broken corpse, still mangled in the grass where he and his co-pilot have thrown themselves out of the helicopter’s window for no discernable reason, you may be lucky enough to receive the punchline over the radio: “Maddox is OK though!”
No HQ, he really is not ok. He is not ok at all.
And yet… despite all of this, some parts of the game are so wonderful that it’s tempting to forgive the disastrous main campaign and just revel in the joy offered by the other play options.
As well as a handful of pre-made, stand-alone scenarios, it’s possible to quickly create your own mini-mission from a series of quick menus (what type of mission, your force(s), who you’ll be facing and so on.) For example, I was able to swiftly construct ‘Operation Bike’ in which my lone saboteur was to infiltrate an enemy-held village and blow up a motorcycle. After sneaking past the outpost guards in a manner that pulled me back to the tense stealth antics of the Thief series, I was able to pop off a few rounds at the man on the motorcycle and grab it for myself (you can drive pretty much any vehicle you come across in the game.) Target acquired, I sped out of the village in a hail of gunfire, swerved it into the woods and blew it up there with a satchel charge. While giggling. It was tremendous.
Moments like that, along with the Armory section, where you gradually unlock a staggering amount of playable weaponry, vehicles, characters and even animals by performing further mini-missions of varying silliness, drew me in and kept me hooked. You haven’t experienced true beauty until you’ve tried to complete a sea-based obstacle course as a civilian fishing boat – or attempted to lay low from hunters as a rabbit. Combined with the ability to make missions in even greater detail with an in-game editor (though that’s not exactly simple) and the possibility of communities sharing these missions amongst themselves, ArmA II has considerable longevity. I’ve already seen short scenarios that cast the player as a detective, original OpFlash missions ported over to ArmA II and a complete sound mod. This trickle will become a flood over the next few months and should ultimately lead to some exciting total conversions.
Naturally, all of these stand-alone missions can also be played in multiplayer as either co-op or competitive. A lot of people will be buying the game purely for this – be they super-hardcore military enthusiasts who want to chunter over headsets about firing zones and squad unity, or casual funsters who’d rather do a co-op mission where they’re all Russian orthodox priests fleeing from killer goats.
A word too about performance and framerates. People have reported various troubles here with all manner of different set-ups, so all a reviewer can really do is state their own findings. Playing on a box at the low end of the recommended specs, and with a slightly creaking x1950 pro card, I was able to get very playable framerates of around 20-35 by reducing draw-distance, toning some of the graphics options down and removing post-processing altogether. ArmA II is pretty customisable (from display options to how alarmingly deadly the enemy soldiers are), so there are plenty of ways to try to tweak extra performance out of the engine. Grab the demo first if you have any doubts though.
Such is the scope of the game and the variety of ways in which it can be played and enjoyed, ArmA II is a tough one to accurately score. It’s hard to recommend the single player campaign in its current state. Patches are forthcoming at a fairly regular rate, but these are unlikely to fix everything; the weird robo-voices and bad writing are certainly here to stay. However, side-options like scenarios and the Armory are so entertaining that it’s possible to just ignore the main campaign and have a splendid time indulging in missions of your own liking. Throw in a potentially endless stream of community-created scenarios alongside multiplayer antics and things look pretty rosy. Ask yourself this: do you want to miss out on the first game in history to give equal billing to the horror of mass graves and a playable chicken obstacle course? You don’t really, do you.
