This aint yo momma's cod.
That horrific problem solved and your left with quite possibly the most realistic shooter ever made. Now the game can be slow at times, especially if you dont know what your doing and that can be a major setback for people. If you tried to walk or even drive to most of the objectives its going to take you 10-15 mins of travel time just to get there.
Fortunately you should really never have to do this. If you play this one, try waiting for a helicoptor pilot to come taxi you and maybe getting him to tow your chosen vehicle to the war zone, or if thats not working out, just walk over to the flagpole and an option will show up for parachuting to wherever you want to go anywhere on the map (new flagpoles show up upon completion of objectives as well). So if your really in a rush to get somewhere you could be there in 30 seconds flat by parachuting, and thats any point you may wish to travel across the whole map.
Show me another game that can have you at any point on a 50km plus map as quickly. Theres also vehicles that can be deployed as mobile respawn stations (that can also be airlifted). All in all once you learn the system, it can be just as quick as other shooters, yet this failure to learn these travel methods is what turns away most of the haters to this game, and i can see why, but this game is something special when you finally learn how to do everything. It just takes a minute to get into.
Another thing that i think turns alot of people away is that pve servers are pretty popular, and if you consider yourself a fps player, then this sounds totally like noob talk.
There are plenty of pvp servers, and now a couple of maps/servers that are a mix of both (id like to give whoever made the Insurgency maps mad props) but even when theres no humans on the other team this game is different because its more setup like a huge multiplayer campaign instead of just a room with bots in it on one team.
One big complaint i had about the vanilla arma 2 game was the fact that you couldnt really go inside many buildings, but alas this has been rectified in AO, and several of the cities/towns are actually larger from what i can tell, with more varying types of buildings for a vast improvement to the urban environments.
and luckily, like stalker, they keep patching the games, and improving the ai, its just a shame it was not done on release, and its still got a decent amount of problems, but one day i hope these issues will get resolved, and they do at least keep whittling away at alot of different types of issues.
The ballistics system is one of my favorites in this game, and you can lean around corners, kneel, and step over certain obstacles like fences with a key command. Overall, you cant beat arma as a shooter. It can be a little slow sometimes, but theres no other game like this.
Imo theres something just awesome about open maps, and this game has the largest ive ever seen for a shooter by a large margin. The maps in this game also show you why its so difficult to fight in an afganistan type area (altho the conflict is a bit different then rl as the rebels have heavy tanks and helicopters and other high priced war machines in bulk in this game)
This one takes some thought to play. Something 90% of gamers today are seemingly incapable of showing.
Trade in your halo's and cod's and try a real shooter.
EDIT: oh and while multiplayer is something awesome, the single player campaign forces you to rely on npc's ai in several cases which can be pretty terrible. Its not a question of your skill in a shooter, its your ability to go along with a ride that might not be obvious. More on this if i can progress further, but currently i have to force myself to play single player as its just painful most of the time....
Update: so im STILL playing this game, and they recently updated it. The newest upgrades are actually awesome and target alot of the things i previously was upset with. It just plays alot smoother then it did in the past, and im sure its cheap to pickup now.
Just remember this one is more of a simulator then a typical shooter.