Introduction
Right, ArmA2 isn't your normal FPS game, lets get that out of the way, it comes from the remarkably small pile of games that call themselves milsim. They're easily recognised by being utterly fucking nails, deeply frustrating, and played by people who care far, far too much about their erotic, pseudo-realistic military fanatasies. Like Friz.
Anyway, as far as the Genre goes, ArmA2 is the new shiny one, and not as evil as previous games. I'm gonna review this msotly from the point of view of the 5punk online campaigns, because well, that's what I play and enjoy. We'll go past other stuff on the way, but mostly this is 5punk gameplay oriented.
Gameplay
The 5punk games are long lasting persistant world capture the island type things (we have a base, have to capture cities from the russians) we have a few things to make it less painful (teleport to special APC bases, parachutes, auto respawning helicopters that can airlift most things) and you get to have AI troops if you want them.
Mostly it removes a lot of the fucking about getting around, but remains pretty milsimmy once you're there.
Combat is very simmy, but not excessively so, mostly, worth wearing a ghillie suit though.
The command interface is fucked up and backwards, but usable enough to do the job. mostly.
Sights and Sounds
ArmA2 is reasonably pretty it looks good, but not great. Mostly strikes me as quite understated, the world's there to fuck around in, not look at. That's not to say it's an ugly game, it just does as much as it needs to and doesn't go over the top. Actually, it does but once you turn post-processing off, it just gets on with it.
The post-processing does make the game look prettier, but it's needless and IMO spoils the experience. does make for really, really pretty screenshots though.
The audio is pretty decent, sometimes the sound levels are more realistic than balanced, so certain vehciles can be extremely loud.
It's also worth mentioning the in game VOIP, just because it's really well designed, with channels for the vehicle you're in, your team, everyone, local area, etc.
Stuff that sucks
The interface, really, just no, I don't want to talk about it. It's clunky and poorly laid out but usable enough to get by, unfortunately it doesn't really let you use the AI to its potential.
Conclusion
ArmA2 isn't for everyone, but if you can get past the backwards interface, there's a good, rewarding co-op game that lets you choose how to play, what you do, and gives you a fairly open world to fuck around in.
Given I've put over 210 hours into this game since we started playing it, I'd say I've gotten my monies worth, and then some.
Anyway, I'm gonna give this 2 scores, the first is for people that think Joint ops is fun, and that swat 4 has a simple control set. The other is for people who believe CoD4 is the pinnacle of gaming, and that the xbox controller is the best thing ever.
As a weird coop milsim:
8/10As an action FPS:
4/10
