one of the most impressive games I've seen in a while, too bad it doesn't really work for most.

User Rating: 7.5 | ArmA II PC
By pos3 | Review Date:
Take the "battle" out of the Battlefield series and the "Simulator" out of the Flight Simulator series and you get ARMA 2 somewhere in between. Taking place in the fictional country if Chernarus ("Black Russia" as oppose to Belarus which is "White Russia"), the campaign aspect of the game known as "Red Harvest" is about the Communists trying to overthrow democracy in the country and the U.S. comes in blah blah blah basically the typical political sob story for the last half of the century.

Taking place in 225 square kilometers of Slavic Chronicle, the look of the games massive environment is a mix between S.T.A.L.K.E.R and every deer hunter game ever created, but plays like neither of them. ARMA 2 tries to take realism to the next level by applying a brutal "1 shot 1 kill"-esque policy when traversing in anything less armored than a tank. This may seem kind of cool but when you spend 20 minutes driving to your destination only to end up on your back the second shots are fired leaves a feeling of dissatisfaction. The vehicles are detailed as hell and take quite a turning curve to figure out, especially the flying ones. In fact, they're so difficult you have to take a grueling tutorial if you ever hope of actually working one of them, but that's how "real life" works I guess.

Being that the game's massive environment is running constantly on what appears to be a graphics engine too good to actually apply to a game remotely close to this size, nothing could possibly go wrong, right ? This game pretty much works a little more than half the time. A game this big honestly shouldn't look this good, not even to today's standards, and it shows it only too well. Even on a good rig, you'll see graphical glitches, pop ups, freezing, crashes, and most of these happen when like 40+ units are fighting at once.

The level of detail for this game is unbelievable. From the cock pits of helicopters and jets when viewed from the first person, to the rock being torn up when something crashes and burns. The developers even gave the the factions their appropriate languages (the Chernarus language is Czech though, which kind of makes sense because the environment is based heavily off of the Czech republic.)

One things for sure, this is the kind of game you'd want a battle editor for, which is a fantastic edition that will keep you entertained for weeks. This is a good thing considering I couldn't actually get online to work, at all. I can really only recommend this game to military fans with beefputers. Everyone else is forewarned.

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