ArmA II Review Page 2

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.