ArmA II Preview

The cub scouts laughed with glee. This time the squirrels would pay!

Thanks to the new High Command system, directing your troops around should be a doddle. True, there is a wealth of different options to play around with, from changing the formation of troops to setting the speed that they run at, but the core orders are extremely simple: you go to the map screen, click on the unit you want to move and then click again to move them. You can set multiple waypoints by control clicking, and if you desire you can edit the unit’s behaviour at each of these. Perhaps you might send some marines running to a particular hill, get them to crawl to the top and then scan the area for hostiles. Or perhaps you’ll just make them dance around in circles by pissing around with the formation settings, creating a bizarre synchronised dancing routine.

While I’ve only had a while to play around with high command mode, it looks to be a very powerful tool that finds a tight balance between depth and accessibility. While the map is clearly the best place to issue orders from, you can also access your command options in first-person perspective – which, let’s not forget, is how most of the game is played. At any given time you can swap between the four core members of Razor team (your leader is unavailable, for plot reasons), each of whom has certain key strengths and abilities – you’ve got a medic, a heavy gunner, a sniper and a scout. Brilliantly, you can have up to three mates join you in campaign mode – so together four of you can explore the massive military playground that is Chernarus. You really can go anywhere too since the whole game is played out on one giant map, but you’d be advised to stick together. Your abilities are designed to complement each other, and besides, only one of you can speak Russian.

“Speak?” you cry. “I don’t want to SPEAK! I want to SHOOT things!” Well, fair enough – but you’ll soon find that it’s fairly important to chat to certain people. As if there weren’t enough to deal with, ArmA II has a few elements that border upon being RPG-like (and by RPG I mean role-playing game, not rocket propelled grenade). As I hinted at earlier, you can gather vital intel on what’s going on in a given area by talking to civilians, but only if you’ve not inflicted too much collateral damage on the poor buggers. There are multiple endings to the ArmA II campaign, and your path will be dictated by the decisions you make and by who you choose to help. Every action you take will be noted by the other factions on the island, so taking one road may win you allies or make life much harder for you down the line. For example, you might come across a cache of weapons hidden near a small town. Do you confiscate them, or leave them behind so that the locals can defend themselves? The locals will remember what you do, so tread carefully.

If you hadn’t worked out by now, ArmA II is going to be an absolutely colossal game – and I’ve not even mentioned all the standalone missions, challenges and playing modes that exist outside of the main campaign, nor the powerful editing tools that are eagerly awaited by ArmA’s online communities. If you’re not familiar with Bohemia’s work, the sheer mass of detail can be a little bit off-putting, but if you’re even vaguely interested in the idea of playing soldiers, you should take a look. Screenshots really don’t do justice to the way the game looks in action, where the painstakingly accurate graphics result in something that looks frighteningly real. They certainly don’t do justice to the unbelievably tense experience of the game itself, the fraught action and the sheer panic that kicks in when someone starts to shoot at you.

Of course, there’s also the small matter of Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising –Codemasters’ follow-up to the original OpFlash, developed without any involvement from Bohemia. I’ve had less hands-on time with this rival, but increasingly I feel like the two products are pursuing different markets. Dragon Rising seems to be doing a pretty impressive job of translating the Flashpoint experience to consoles. While there will be a PC version of Dragon Rising, I imagine that most computer-owning purists will look to ArmA II for their military fix. Conversely, Bohemia has gone quiet on the subject of a 360/PS3 version of their game – so it’s not clear what their intentions are in this regard. At any rate, the bottom line is that ArmA II is looking pretty superb – and since the release date has just been moved forward to June 19, we’ll be getting our grubby mitts on it fairly soon. In the mean time… stay frosty!

ArmA II will be released on PC on June 19.