ArmA II Preview

"This'll teach that pigeon to crap on my truck!"

It's chaos: there's a gunfight taking place in the middle distance, over by the tree line. A handful of screaming villagers are fleeing in your direction, running for their lives. You dash forward, your vision blurring slightly as your body rocks back and forth under the weight of your kit. You pass a goat, standing alone and confused. The rattle of gunfire is all around you - and you suddenly notice a very particular sound, sharper and closer than the others. Someone is firing at you. Scanning the horizon, you spot the guy. And then a bullet compacts into your skull with a wet 'thwack'. Ave atque vale.

Your first encounter with ArmA 2 can be somewhat disturbing. In its strongest moments, at the times when the sheer mass of detail really conspires to suck you in, you'll feel about as close to a real-life war as you could ever want to be. The excellent graphics are a major contributing factor to this immersion, but it's down to other things, too: it's the sheer number of things that can be going on at once. It's the fact that death comes swiftly, that you could be killed at any moment. It's the use of the Doppler Effect, the scientific name for the way sound is distorted by movement - like when a car drives past you in the street. Or like when someone is firing a 7.62mm Full Metal Jacket round at your head.

In other words, it's the sheer scope of the game that grabs you - both in terms of the size of the in-game playing area (a whopping 225 square km) and in terms of the level of detail. Even if you leave aside the 136 scale-modelled vehicles and the 81 weapon variants, there are other, even weirder statistics that Bohemia Interactive Studios are touting. For example, the game's fictional location, Chenarus, has a total of 1883 unique road signs scattered across its land mass. Each of these signs is accurate and unique. Following them will lead you directly to wherever you want to go... provided that you can read Russian. Okay, so many people who play this game won't be able to do that - but it's the combined effect of touches like these that make the world feel like a real place. And that makes it more scary when someone is trying to shoot you in the brain.

Let's back up a bit. All this number-crunching may sound a bit intense to those of you unfamiliar with the previous ArmA, or with its landmark predecessor, Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis. In a nutshell, Bohemia is the studio responsible for pioneering the post-millennial war sim. The original OpFlash helped to inspire a whole generation of titles with its emphasis on swift, realistic combat and a sandbox-style game world that let you do as you please. If a mission asked you to infiltrate a hostile base to retrieve some important documents, it would let you go in all stealthy-as-a-mouse - but it would also let you raid an enemy depot, steal a tank and then blow up everything in sight. It was that kind of game. And it rocked.

ArmA 2 also lets you check out people's asses...

The Operation Flashpoint name now belongs to Codemasters, but the ArmA series is more a less a continuation of the work the team started back in 2001. The first ArmA was a moderate success, but Bohemia felt that it could have done better - which is where this game comes in. You may or may not care about extreme realism. It may not excite you to learn that you can experience a HALO parachute drop in full real-time; but even if it doesn't, you should be aware of this game. ArmA 2 has the potential to be the most definitive military game since... well, forever. If you have even vague memories of picking up twigs and pretending they were guns, you should keep an eye on this one.

The only problem with previewing a title like this is that the whole project is simply gargantuan. We visited Bohemia Interactive Studio's headquarters in Prague a few weeks ago, and even though we spent a good couple of hours with the game, it feels like we barely made a dent on all it has to offer. Still, we'll do our best to describe the flavour of what we played.

Bohemia started us off right at the deep end by letting us jump into a full-blown multiplayer war. ArmA Warfare is a game mode that mixes RTS elements into the FPS pot, resulting in an insanely large military gangbang. Players join one of two sides and square off across the map (all 225km of it), but instead of each side comprising of a handful of individuals, each user is essentially in charge of a small squad. You'll have a small, steadily-increasing budget which you can use to buy new kit or troops when you're at one of your bases. You might want to just buy yourself a sniper rifle, or perhaps you'll purchase a jeep with a mounted machine gun. You could drive this yourself, or you could order one of your men to drive while you man the boomstick. It's totally up to you, but bigger decisions affecting your side can only be made by one player, who acts as your general. This guy can decide to spend his budget on building structures like factories or other facilities which in turn open up spending options for you. Imagine Command & Conquer from a ground level view, and with some other guy calling the shots.