[Introduction]
I was meant to write this review around a week ago, so decided it best to sit down and reacquaint myself with a few hours of ARMA3 - Hours turned to days, turned to weeks. ARMA3 is a rabbit hole of a first/third person military simulator that, while dating from 2013 now, holds up well.
[First Impressions]
I think it's fair to say my first impressions of ARMA3 are a little rose-tinted. When it came out I was part of an ARMA2 Milsim [more on that next week] that had just transitioned over. DAY-Z Mod was all the craze, with the standalone disaster releasing only a few months after ARMA3. Safe to say, it was a good time in gaming. If I take away my nostalgia pipe and really think on the matter, the game still holds up well. As soon as you launch it you're greeted with fast paced music, beautiful vistas from the game itself and plenty of neat little touches - like the background shimmering and changing as if you were watching it through a UAV back in the OpsRoom. You get all excited, mouse over "Single player" and -- boom. Overwhelming disappointment. The single player campaign [Pre-"Old Man" DLC] was utter garbage. The AI were clunky, the controls for your squad were a never ending menu of pressing 46 buttons to make them move five foot forwards, only to NOT shoot the enemy that was hidden behind an inch of bush, and for you to get creamed by a laser-pointed LMG 14km away. It was maddening for such an expensive, high-quality game to be so shockingly bad. And I don't mean 'this is too hard for me' whinge and moan, I mean bad.
Although, ask anyone who has ever bought ARMA3, anyone who has ever played any big near-real Military Simulator game, and they'll tell you the exact same reasoning behind buying it - multiplayer. This is where ARMA3 really shines; the the bread and butter of the game, the true reason I couldn't care less about the singleplayer. Two huge, immensely detailed and well planned maps sprawling with a hundred towns, cities and villages all crawling with players. You load up a Deathmatch and watch as you get hammered by the same guy holed up with a Katiba in the hospital in Kavala. You load up a ZvZ [Zeus vs Zeus - more on this later] and plan a meticulous campaign of destruction over the island as a god of war. You hop in my personal favourite, a Capture the Island COOP, where Area of Operations flash up on the map and it's your job to take your friends in there and cream the AI using anything you can before moving back to base to re-arm and take on the next. There's ARMA-Life servers, where you can roleplay just some dude tending his crops or a drug dealer trying to bribe the police. There's go-cart racing, flying training, Team vs Team - you name it, there's a mode out there for you. Up to hundred, sometimes more depending on the server, real players running around in barely organised chaos.
[Development]
Developed by the Czech company Bohemia Interactive, who are a household name among military simulator and near-real shooters, ARMA3 was rather obviously the third instalment in the ARMA franchise - though it can be argued that Operation Flashpoint was the granddaddy of them all. Literally just meaning "war" or "weapon of war" it truly does say what it is on the tin - a combined arms military simulator. Bohemia really began to become a well-known name outside of the already cult military following as DAY-Z became more and more popular. I won't go into too much detail, but DAY-Z was a mod for the predecessor, ARMA2, that broke the stratosphere of popularity within the wider gaming community with hundreds upon hundreds of YouTube videos flooding channels left and right. Safe to say even some of the most popular YouTubers today [Soviet, looking at you here buddy] started out making DAY-Z videos. Fast forwards a few years and Bohemia announce that they're releasing an all new, all singing all dancing upgrade from the rather clunky and dated ARMA2 and the community went wild. With the Alpha dropping at 2012 E3 it just built until the release in Sept 2013.
During the development, a whole debacle with the Greek island of Lemnos [the original setting and name for the island of Altis] arresting two of the devs for taking photographs at a military base on the island itself. There had already been some trouble brewing as the Greek Parliament had discussed the virtual world, a near carbon copy of their island, had the potential to cause threats to the national security of Lemnos.
In a game of tit for tat, the devs claimed to be on holiday and simply taking photos of the bases with their obvious interest in the military causing them to take a look while there. A serious espionage charge was levelled against the two devs, as you would imagine with taking pictures of a military base [which is a crime in Greece.] With Bohemia speaking out and taking an active role on the forums, locking threads discussing the Greek Military that pre-dated the incident and seemingly holding back the release of the game with citations of 'polish' being needed, it did not look too good. Even the Czech president got involved after their first bail hearing was denied, calling for 'special' attention from his Greek counterpart. After a tense, and understandably troubling, 129 day stand-off between Greece and Bohemia [read, Czech] parties the Devs were released on bail. It would appear that the renaming of the island from Lemnos to Altis had a big part to play as the release date was only a few weeks after this. What back-room discussions went on? Who knows, but it's safe to say I feel for the guys. Whether they were taking pictures for the game, which they claimed they were not due to it being already 'finished', or simply taking snaps for the holiday photo album, no one wants to be held in a foreign land on military espionage charge.
[Game Mechanics]
Mechanically speaking the game holds up quite well, with some glaring issues I will get to. Being a combined arms, meaning tanks, trucks, helicopters and jets, the driving for the vehicles is what I call 'simple, but effective.' It's no driving simulator, but the vehicles all have an inherently unique and even nice feel to them. The jets again are simple yet well managed, helicopters much the same. It crosses the bridge between 'not-quite-X-simulator' and 'simulated enough.' You don't want to live and breath every detail of take-off with a Jet because quite simply, it takes away from the game. I keep using the term near-real because that's truly what I believe it is, real enough to feel so yet 'gamey' enough to be enjoyable.
Zeus. What a brilliant idea that was, truly. As Zeus you ascend to be a god, with a million menus to place real-time assets down in the field. By which I mean, your camera zooms to the sky and you can literally place squads, tanks, buildings, guns, even something like a bandage, on the floor in real-time. I place it, my mate sees it. It blew my mind when it came out. It's a take on their old mission editor that remained and allows you to build custom scenarios and put your pals through the ringer in suicide missions you crafted from the ground up. Every aspect, from mortars firing as 'off-screen' artillery, to smoke dropping and objective markers 'pinging' on your HUD, I adore it. It also gave rise to the strangest game-mode I have ever seen, ZvZ. Two gods, with arbitrary rules decided between them, take on one another with their AI. I once played out a mission where I was attempting to invade Altis against my friend, and planned every detail down to the individual make-up of my battalion and what vehicles. A finite resource to use, where I actually could have done anything I wanted. One of the best games of my time.
My gripes though, and oh boy are there some. The actions are clunky. You switch weapons, or rise from one of the various prone/kneeling/standing positions and it's clunk city. You open a door, or chuck a grenade and everything feels so laboured, like your character is moving through treacle. Getting in and out of vehicles in combat situations is a death sentence. Imagine if you will, you're being extracted under fire. Tanks are rolling in, tracers zipping by in the twilight, you hear the chatter of enemies close as your pilot screams "get in." You sprint to the back of the chopper, firing off a few covering shots while you go, and use the worlds most stupid action mention to scroll down to the right option. You move your mouse a centimetre before clicking and suddenly you're in the choppers inventory. Swearing you back out, mouse-wheeling to 'get in' once more and clicking. Suddenly your character starts the slow and laboured animation of slinging their weapon, for some reason. Then they stand up straight like a beacon in the night, for some reason. Then they begin to climb an invisible ladder, for some reason. All the while you're getting shot at, you're an active object in the environment and can be engaged and killed as such. It's infuriating. If it was real [let's be honest, no chopper would touch down in the middle of an active AO while under fire, but we shall look passed that] you would be hurling yourself in the back of the ramp like a maniac while returning fire at anything looking remotely suspicious, not doing some ancient masonic dance to summon the rain gods behind a helicopter.
I mentioned it above too, but the action menu. Oh boy. To interact with the world, you generally use your mouse-wheel. When near an interactable object you get a small menu in the top right of your screen with some options. Open Door, Get in, Pick up X object - you get the idea. To use that menu you scroll, then click with the mouse-wheel. A fine system in theory, but it does not hold up in practise. Near a few doors? Yeah, you don't get to know which one you're opening. Pick and hope. Near a body you need to loot? You select Gear, only to be presented with their weapon and not their body. You shuffle and select Gear again for the same result. You bury your face into the recently shot corpse of your friend and select Gear a third time for a 50/50 chance of actually getting their blasted Gear up.
But, I hear you say, this just means you have to take your time! No issue, just be sure which one you want to select! Which I agree, 'til the point there's a hundred rounds hammering the ground next to you, you hear a tank turret traversing towards you and a jet screams above. In combat, the action menu is Satan, and has killed me more times than the enemy, I swear.
[Graphics]
I still believe the game holds up. If we add sounds to the mix here, because why not, then I still get fully immersed in the world whenever I take part in it. The vehicles are well designed, given they're all near-future variants, the world is stunning and everything is as it should be. Sure, it's a game that chugs CPU and you really can burn out a PC, even now, but it holds up and has that mid 'Teens feel of still very much a game, but getting close to realistic. Honestly, I prefer it over some of the ultra-modern, realism central shooters.
[Story - Mods/DLC]
There sure is a story. Probably. I replaced our usual section with Mods here. No ARMA3 review can be complete without discussing one of the longest standing, strangest yet most dedicated modding communities out there. With the game setting being 2030's with weapons and vehicles that could be conceived [or are in use today], there was always going to be an active modding community. Though I sound like a cheesy salesman when I say it but, you name it? They've got it. Want to mod your sound to be ultra realistic? Done. Want to have an in-depth medical system with BPI, various wounds, triage and all that? Done. Want to play as a stormtropper in an AT AT? Sure why not. As long as the server has the right mods, or you don't mind playing around in Zeus on singleplayer, you can be anything or do anything you want.
Bohemia have also been generous with the DLC, but not too overwhelming. Two new maps, jungle island map [Tanoa] and Malden, Jets, Tanks, Helicopters, Marskman, Laws of War and Tac-Ops as well as Contact. All solid DLC that add depth to their respective fields with new vehicles, weapons, gear etc added. What I truly love above it all though? Bohemia's approach to the whole DLC thing. I am not a lover of flying, I'm shocking and crash often; so I never bought the Helicopters DLC. One of my favoured servers has all DLC enabled, and includes some of the helicopters. Does that mean I can't get in them because I don't own them? No, I can get in. I can't fly, which is fair, but I can sit happy as a passenger. The guns from Marksman are there too, and if I -really- want to use one, I can. I get a watermark that comes across my screen from time to time to advertise their DLC, but my point is I am not shut out. I don't need to own all DLC to use the content in MP, nor do I get locked out of it simply because someone else is using it. A very solid approach, one that a lot could learn from. Only Paradox comes to mind in allowing multiple people to use one persons DLC in multiplayer games.
[Pros]
- Unending Depth
- Still overwhelmingly played to this day, with hundreds of 100+ player servers.
- Huge community, inside and outside.
- Healthy approach to DLC.
- Mods, mods, mods.
- Some of the most memorable times you will ever have in a game.
[Cons]
- No singleplayer worth talking about.
- Still system intensive to this day.
- A steep learning curve, over facing start.
- Clunky animations that will drive you insane after a few hours.
- Can sometimes be too specialised when it comes to mods
- Some elitism present.
[Conclusion]
You want a near-real, near-future, in-depth shooter to sink hundreds of hours into without knowing? Pick up ARMA3. You want to join a huge community of Milsim [again, more next week] and even competitive players? Pick up ARMA3. You want to just mess about with your friends, storm a lovely 'Greek' island and destroy everything in sight? Pick up ARMA3. Honestly if you have even a vague interest in military games and want a bit more realism than the latest COD67, give it a go. I'll see you in the field, solider.
[Score]
8/10
/BAT
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