My ARMA review

[dirtylarrygb 0]

ARMA:Armed Assualt PC Review:

Posted gamespot/myspace etc, (what did I miss out?)

Ok, you've played PC war games right? From running around in Counter Strike, to "p'wning" entire squads in BF2 in a tank? ARMA is all the best bits, from all those PC military shooters since 1990, on Crack!

Problem is, you'll need a real beast of a PC to run it properly, as usual with a modern PC game, the recommend and min' specs on the box, mean the game will just about run in low res'.

But, if you have a high tech modern gaming rig, ARMA is about the best looking Game yet on the PC, well till Crysis and Alan Wake hit later this year.

If you have a 4000 mhz + (Single or Dual core) CPU Geforce 7800 + or ATI 1950 +, 2 GIG RAM + or better, the visuals are simply breath taking. ARMA does for First Person games, what Company of Hero's does for RTS games. It's a literal genre definer, visually, as well as in game play terms.

ARMA has a 400 sq KM map, that you play single player, or multiplayer missions on. Graphically the outdoor enviroments are at least twice as good as even the best outdoor bits of Oblivion were on the PC. The ocean on "high" settings, is really 3d! Waves deform the surface and race to shore. Seriously you can clip a 3D wave while flying. Which was a total surprise to me as for years I have been used to zipping in a helicopter 1 ft above sea level and never once had to worry about the ocean might not be level!

Sunlight filters through the blades of a helicopter onto the cockpit when you fly towards a sunset while glinting off the cockpit glass (and the helmet of the gunner sitting in front of you!. With true "proper" HDR lighting effects which leave you squinting at your monitor. The wind ruffles trees and plants, raindrops splater on tarmac .Flies buzz around you when you lie under a tree looking down your optical gun sights. You get the drift, but on a high end system, this game is simply breath taking. I've spent about 40 hours just flying walking and driving round the map exploring. Depth of field focus effects are used when you raise a gunsight for aiming. In fact I've seen ARMA do quite a few effects I've never seen any other DX9 game do and I thought only DX10 would do!

All the military hardware and personel are high def'', they are well modelled in 3D and texture detailed. Many appear much more complex than even the best units from BF2. A huge variety or trees and plants make up the foilage and hundreds of different sorts of buildings make up the towns and villages that litter the landscape. The only downside is some of the face textures on the soldiers are a bit "cartooney".

ARMA is a true next gen 3d engine, it has time of day simulation, even weather and fog patterns. Just like Operation Flashpoint before it (2001) ,which was the first PC game I remeber could that even do that (even before GTA 3 showed us a sandbox with "time of day" settings on the PS2). On" very high" graphical settings, shadows are so realistic, they are almost life like, they even work correctly at night or in the fog.

If like me, you have an 8800 GTX/GTS card. You can crank up Anti Alias and all the visual settings and get an idea just how good Crysis and Alan Wake might look this year!

Gameplay, just like Bohemia's first game, Operation Flashpoint, hasn't changed that much, ARMA is a tough as hell. It's a military simulator, so well done, real Armies use it for training worldwide. Single player missions are like the tough stuff from the Delta Force series, with the added bonus, that on many missions, if you die, you can swap to another unit and carry on the fight. A bit like BF:2 Modern combat on the X 360. This means, you can start as a sniper but jump to being the pilot of Cobra attack chopper etc, but during the mission in essence these can serve as "Lives" for the player.

Realism wise, even on the novice settings, it's hard. Bullets drop as they are affected by gravity over distance and can be affected by wind (even bounce off the ground/walls etc!, you can only carry a realistic amount of ammo, trying to shoot anything while running around rambo style (like you would in Counter Strike/BF2) leads to instant death. The learning curve of this game, is you unlearning all your Quake/Doom/Counterstrike/BF2 skills, and becoming a real soldier.

It can take a couple of days of playing to even begin to progress through the supplied missions. Even the training can take a few hours on the more realistic setting. On the harder settings, you have to navigate using landmarks or even the stars in the night sky (yes at night, Bohemia have put the real accurate earth starscape in the game, that even moves with the seasons!. No handy "you are here" display on your in game map. AI units will try and flank you and trap you etc. On anything but novice mode you'll find out just how deadly modern warfare really is.

It's almost a surprise that ARMA doesn't make you strip your rifle and clean it! They also don't appear to have weapon jams which is odd.

Many reviews will say the AI is faulty, but they miss the point this is a FP Military Simulator NOT a First Person Shooter. Yes the AI units are much better than you at spotting you through trees and grass, but since patch 1.05 you can turn off the grass and make it a little more even. Bohemia are still refining the AI as they patch. Thing is, we are used to the bots in CS, BF2 etc, and frankly a SIM pet on a Nintendo DS had more IQ than those things. And ARMA is about multiplayer as it grows not single player. You didn't buy BF:2 for the single player did you?

Like Operation Flashpoint before it, you have to command AI units in tanks and choppers, to move and shoot, you can't be a 1 man army. It takes 3 people to operate a tank effectivily (Commander/Gunner/Driver). 2 people for a helicopter gunship. Which takes a bit of getting used to, although this turns out to be fun, as AI chopper gunners do as they are told and are excellent shot's unlike real players in BF2 who would jump in as your gunner then couldn't hit a barndoor 3 ft away!

Single Player wise, it could take you several weeks to months of play, to complete the current included single player missions. This content ranges from simple, snipe a few squads on your own, to controlling huge offensive operations of Air and Armoured divisions to take a city, with lots of special op' type "go do 4 things in order" to complete missions in between. In true sandbox style you are free to try anything you want how ever you want.

Just learning to fly and land a helicopter in realistic mode is a major achievment. There are a few cheats like an auto-hover feature and 3rd person mode, but all tanks/jeeps/boats and aircraft in the game have real world views. Thus, the only way to view the full battlefield in a tank, is to pop your head out of the turrent which carries the risk of infantry shooting you in the head, otherwise you have to peer out of a very small slot!

As soon as you have installed ARMA, you have access to use the ingame mission editor (which works inside the game and isn't a seperate programme!. Which should lead to weeks of fun, while you build missions that suit your very own tastes. Want to re-inact the gunship attack from "Apocalypse Now", or the even D-day landings with modern Military hardware? You build it you can play the only limit is your imagination.

You just place units on the map, choose their skill level, which ones you want to play or just command and test in seconds. You can be advanced by adding waypoints, mission objectives, scripts etc. If you want to start building missions to share, there is a very helpful website provided by Bohemia were you can read "how to's" and share/download missions with others. Player made missions are very popular. This gets rids of the problem of having to wait for the developer to launch an expansion 6 months later. The ingame editors turn's ARMA into semi-sandbox style game as you can populate the world with what you want to fight and what you want to fight it with and then just play till you want to try something new.

At this point, I should add Bohemia Interactive are one of those rare games-creators, who keep adding content and patches even years after the game is released. Right now in patch 1.05, there are about 30 unit types to choose from, in about 12 months time, there will be 100's as Bohemia and the ARMA mod community constantly add to the games database.

Multiplayer in patch 1.05, is where, so far, I have found a few bugs, I've had problems getting online matches to work. But I have been so busy playing the supplied missions and campaign and making my own stuff, it's not an issue for me, I know Bohemia will keep patching the game so by the time I'm getting fed up of single player stuff, multiplayer will work as well as, say BF2 does for me right now.

People always forget BF:1942, Joint Op's, Counterstrike, BF:2 all went through at least a six months period from release to become the great games we remember them as today.

On the multiplayer side, you can even create your own multiplayer missions. This means. unlike many other FP military games, no getting bored of the same 10 maps time and time again. With a 400 sq km map it could take ages for it to feel like you have seen it all before.

Soundwise, it's surround, and open AL, some of the sound effects on the guns are a bit rubbish (many rifles sounds Tinny), many cars/jeeps don't sound as good as they do in other shooters. But this minor flaw in ARMA like Operation Flashpoint before, will be corrected over time, by either Bohemia or the modders getting better samples. You do hear bullets retort just like realife, you can see the flash of a gun fire then here the sound which is very life like. Something to note, is ARMA features a very clever text-to-speech engine, when an AI unit shouts an order, it doesn't play a simple sound file, the engine puts it all together. For instance a unit will really shout "Machine gunner at 3 oclock!, fire at will, unit 2 down "etc, all this is generated on the fly, which means entire squads chattering away as you play, which leads to AI units giving you the same sort of game info only real players normally would do over VOIP. Some reviewers have said the sound samples used from units talking are "not good enough" not even being aware they are hearing cutting edge game technology that can deliver more script and words than even a bluray full of audio could ever do!

There's a very detailed command system that can take some getting used to. It's time consuming and very much like the system from Op' Flashpoint. You can create you own macro's though, to speed up the process. Over the course of a few days it becomes second nature but yet again, you have to invest some time and effort. There is an overhead "top down" view for controlling your squads thats a bit like the commander view BF2 as well.

ARMA is one fo the few current games that supports triple head monitors configurations, right out of the box, that's right, if you have a huge games rig and three monitors (hardware details on bohemia website) you can get ARMA out of the box to display front, left and right views, on seperate monitors. This makes "tree top level" choper runs so realistic, you will dream about flying them when you stop playing the game. You will need EXTREME hardware to get this to work in high res. But as Intel Duo/Quad cores and Nvidia 8800 cards continue dropping in price this year, many players may be running "triple head" set ups for games like ARMA by the start of 2008. Of course you can sample triple head now if you have a widescreen monitor by turning it on and then playing with a fish-eye lens view on a single monitor, which is pretty much like playing the game after dropping "acid" but bloody amusing.

Add to that, ARMA also supports trackir, a hardware "head motion tracker", which lets you look around in 3d on a single/dual/triple monitor setup, I Imagine Military's all over the world will be snapping up and modding the ARMA engine for years to come. And hardcore Military Gamers will be running huge hardware by the end of the year and running ARMA at levels of realism the games industry has only just started to think about.

ARMA, has it flaws, the in-game physics of some objects can be a strange, I witnessed a jeep blow up from from a mine, which then flew about a mile of the

map. Building's can't be damaged to the level of desruction, that the buildings in Company of Hero's or Crysis can, at best they are like the buildings in BF2 (Sadley no driving you tank through a house yet in ARMA). Perhaps this is something we may see corrected as the game is patched. The addition perhaps of the Aegis physics ard and software would be lapped up by hardcore gamers and the military.

To make the game more commercial, it's surprising that a more user friendly BF:2multiplayer mode was not implemeted. Dumb AI units, no bullet physics, 1 man tanks etc. Most probably, the ARMA mod communtiy will output something like this soon. I get the feeling, with all the clever hardware support ,ARMA, has been really made for the Military worldwide and Bohemia will sell a professional version of the engine and mod that for Millions. ARMA is just the public offshoot we get to play now, while Bohemia are busy attending meetings at the DOD and MOD etc.

But then perhaps that isn't a bad thing.

Summary:

ARMA like Oblivion, Halflife 2, BF2 before it, is a genuine "genre" changer, Visually It's about the most stunning game on any platform right now with so many visual first's, if you want to test your PC for CRYSIS, install ARMA and see if your PC can run it looking good*.

There are some flaws, even the best games have them, but, with an inbuilt mission editor and great support from the company who made it, if you ever played with toy soldiers as a child then this IS the game for you. The logevity of ARMA should be fantastic.

If ARMA achieves anything, it should be that FP:MS should be considered a game category just as much as RTS, FPS, 4x, etc are now. Much like Supreme Commander, ARMA is an engine for the next few years that only the very "lucky" few can see properly now.

ARMA is like Counterstrike/BF2 for intelligent adults, it's for people with big PC's who want to play mature realistic simulations. If you want arcade action, right now, ARMA ain't for you.

* Anti Alias to x4/x8 AF to x16, all visual settings in game, to VERY HIGH (in game (View distance 3-4km) at screen res 1280x1024 (4:3) 1600x1024 (16:9) or better, with gamma correct AA turned on,Transparency super sample enabled (Nvidia users). If you get better than 30 FPS you might be ok for the eye candy in CRYSIS!

I can do the above with an AMD 4000+ single core, EVGA 8800 GTX KO ACS3, 2 GIG RAM and XIFI, at about an average 25 FPS best 80 FPS in the 1600x1024 16:9 res at 4x AA.

And yes, I'm well aware, Crytek and EA say Cyrsis "will run on low-end pc's", if you listen carefully to what they really said, "Crysis will look ok, on what WAS considered high spec 2 years ago". Well "high spec" 2 years ago was an FX 64 AMD, 2 GIG RAM and 6800 256 GTX ULTRAS in SLI. So is YOUR current machine as good as that?

[mbv 0]

Overall a pretty fair review. Only thing I would disagree with is the high praise for the visual quality of the game. The infantry dress and weapons do generally look good (with some exceptions) as does most of the landscape, but I find the interior modelling on vehicles and aircraft to be very basic and even plug ugly in some cases (helicopter interiors in particular) with very basic textures for the controls/cockpit. The damage modelling is very simplistic and blown up vehicles look no better than damaged tanks etc in Medal of Honor or Call of Duty.

[dirtylarrygb 0]

Overall a pretty fair review. Only thing I would disagree with is the high praise for the visual quality of the game. The infantry dress and weapons do generally look good (with some exceptions) as does most of the landscape, but I find the interior modelling on vehicles and aircraft to be very basic and even plug ugly in some cases (helicopter interiors in particular) with very basic textures for the controls/cockpit. The damage modelling is very simplistic and blown up vehicles look no better than damaged tanks etc in Medal of Honor or Call of Duty.

I agree the cockpits just about as good as BF2, not as good as say Crysis they do need some work, interiors of tanks/apcs etc need to be better lit, or well like BF2 not lit much. I imagine the "Mod squad" will take care of that.

House's collapsing, erm not bad, not "oh wow I shat my pants". but better than BF2 or Joint op's were a tacticale nuke would leave a bullet hole at best. At least smoething happens on some buildings, thats pretty new.

But if you run ARMA at very high at 1600 res 16:9 every 10-15 mins something you see will take your breath away. The HDR fx, fire smoke etc etc when running SuperSample AA at x4 or especially HIGH AA in game (that makes my machine start to chug lol) well that can make you go OH MY GOD.

I'm sure I have seen whales in the ocean.

[monkeyboy27 0]

The cockpits look a bit rubbish when you compare them to those of a flight sim, but they're a lot better than the 2d textures bf2 used!!

[dirtylarrygb 0]

The cockpits look a bit rubbish when you compare them to those of a flight sim, but they're a lot better than the 2d textures bf2 used!!

And we all oh'ed and argghed over how cool BF2 looked 12 month's ago...

Once Bohemia do the MILITARY version and flog it with any luck they can ask if they can clamber all over the real kit with a digital camera and take new textures then add a patch for us the gamers.

I'm kinda hopping the same for many of the guns, as right now, many sound a bit poo. The supersonic effect etc is very cool in 5.1 BUT they sound weedy.

Once ARMA is out in the state's either someone from the US military might be able to supply great wave samples or a Texan with a gun basement might be able to...