A real "mil sim" that hits the ground running and gets the job done.
Now... There's a lot to say about this game, probably too much for me to write about in here, well I could write it but who would read it?
So what makes this game different? Simply put. Realism and variety. Albeit it's not perfect but it's enough to keep you happy for a long time if you like realistic shooters and come in with the mindset of having a serious attitude about it. This isn't just a run and gun, cs/cod4, gungho type of game.
With over 100 different weapons to choose from I'm almost positive there's something in here you would enjoy.
It's also massive. The main islands you play on are HUGE, absolutely huge and you will need vehicles if you need to get from once place to another. Unless you wanna run around for hours and I mean that literally.
However, I was sad that you can't customize your loadout and look like in games such a call of duty 4 or 5. You can customize your look a little. You can change your face from a few dozen (Like 50? I haven't counted) presets. You can change the voice, 5 presets and you can change the pitch and you can add some fancy glasses.
There's a good amount of variants of each gun to keep you happy. You can choose many different types of guns, ak's, m16's/m4's, etc. They each have different mods to them, different sights, a 203, suppressed or not, etc. and you simply won't find this level of authenticity and variety in any game to this date.
There is however not much to choose from when you get in the world of sidearms. You have your 1911, m9, a suppressed m9, a makarov and a suppressed makarov. That's it.
There's a huge variety of vehicles to choose from. There's helicopters, there's jets, there's even giant c-130's. There's ships, there's cars, there's buses, there's uav's, there's tanks, there's jeeps, just so many.
There's also challenges you can play in the games "armory", thus earning points to unlock new weapons in the armory. It's quite fun and they are quite varied. Everything from assassinating people, protecting someone or something, or having to protect yourself after wave of wave of attacks before being rescued to hunting because you haven't had anything to eat for days and you're starving.
Multiplayer is great, it might take a little to get used to, there aren't many servers hosting deathmatch type games, most of the servers are hosting either, "Hold" or "Cti" Or "coop" With the first two is you're spent trying to capture points on the map. With coop, you do certain objectives, like securing and capturing certain villages or cities, attacking convoys, and so forth.
The sounds of many of the weapons and vehicles are pretty much spot on overall. Which is a huge plus and makes things feel even more real. Some people might complain about hearing "popping" sounds as they are being shot at. But I'll tell you, it is what you hear in real life. It might vary a little but the only thing you'll really hear is that rather distinct "pop". If you don't believe me, if you have an outdoor range with targets that raise from below... The military has ranges where they'll have targets that can be fixed, changed, marked and recorded (For scoring and such) from below and it's perfect because you can stay down there safely and watch the target get hit and you'll hear that distinct pop as the bullet crosses over head.
The graphics are lovely, there's no doubt about that. Especially for the amount of stuff that it's doing. It's pretty remarkable seeing hundreds of troops go at it and wipe each other out.
There's a lot of great things about this game, there honestly is.
But there are quite a few downfalls as well.
First and foremost? There's no secret that this game is a pig.
You're going to need a pretty beefy rig to run this even at low to medium settings.
You're not going to need it as much if you're in a city environment as you will when you're out in the forest or fields. Because grass and trees will KILL your fps. Luckily there's many options you can change in arma's video settings so if the grass is simply too much and instead of playing a game, you're watching a slideshow.. You can just turn the "Terrain Detail" to the lowest setting and the grass disappears.
So if you're running something lower than a 2ghz, less than 2gbs of ram, and a video card under 512mbs of ram... You're gonna be hurtin. Unless you don't mind playing at 640x480 with everything turned down. Ok that was a slight exaggeration but you get the point.
Also, this game is NOT for someone who just wants to go around bunny hopping, long jumping and spraying people down with their mac10's. Or someone who just wants to drop 100+ kills and "pwn all teh no0bz". This game is also quite difficult, it's very easy to end up on the ground with gunshot wounds all over, even if you're being super careful and taking your time.
There's also random crashes (I've experienced probably 7 since I've started playing, so not that bad), weird bugs every now and then and the ai is far from perfect. It's very good but not perfect.
And if you've never played games like this or the old operation flashpoint games... You'll probably be quickly annoyed by the bots you play with because they'll talk to you. They'll report enemy positions, tell you where they're at, if they've been shot, if someone's dead, etc. But there's a bunch of pre-recorded pieces of audio that the computer uses to tell you things. So.
Lets say you want to know where your squad is. You can ask them that. Then they might reply...
"I'm at grid 090141" but since each word and number was recorded separately it's very choppy sounding. You can see plenty of videos of that on youtube and if there's a lot happening it can quickly become too much for someone who's not used to it.
The death animations are pretty cheesy, and there isn't much variety there. If you shoot someone, they might slump or fall over but it's the same thing over and over again. There's also problems where if they're moving and you kill them the animation of the unit kind of freaks out and goes between what he was doing and his death animation.
There's infamous little bugs like the "headbug" which most servers have a button that you can simply click on to fix, and little things like that.
Multiplayer games can take HOURS. But thankfully, it's not like you're locked into playing it all once you start. But don't except to finish a game if you join a server and only have half an hour to play. You might finish 1 objective (If you're playing coop modes).
Well I can go on, there's so much to talk about but I hope this gives a little more insight into this massive game. But there's so much more, there's the amazing editor which you can do so much with, there's tons of mods people have created for this game, there's a great community (Overall) as well..
So if you want a realistic military shooter, with a ton of variety, this is something worth checking into. If you just wanna grab a gun and run down a hall way or street and mow down tons of people really quickly and be done in 10 - 20 minutes... This more than likely is not for you.