Previously, we failed to work our way through much of Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis, the military simulation that pulls no punches and demands your attention. I have since opened that boxed version to see what goodies were inside. Nothing, basically. The military isn't about goodies. It's about getting difficult jobs done without getting your colleagues killed.
Breaking away from Codemasters to show they could go it alone, Bohemia Interactive released ArmA: Armed Assault, the next step in their military simulator series. Just as demanding, just as convoluted, just as scary, this is probably going to turn out no different from their earlier game: I'm not going to survive very long.
Fun Times
Like Cold War Crisis, very early on in playing ArmA, you realise that this game is absolutely not about the graphics, and one might strongly argue the story either. I'm playing ArmA: Gold, which brings in some expansion content together into one neat package, but it's not polished in any way. Every part of this game is functional, far more than aesthetic.
Once I worked out which storyline was the original, and not from an expansion, we're shown a news report of the fictional island of Sahrani, a place with a troubled past, but things have calmed down.
The news report wraps up, the troops are looking forward to coming home, and we're left to wonder where all the action of the mil-sim is to be found. Well, that's the military for you: it's not all explosions and gunfire. But ArmA will offer us explosions and gunfire soon enough.
Sat in the front of an HMV listening to the radio chatter, we're allowed to get used to the landscape outside from a place of relative safety and comfort. There's not much to look at, but it does feel real, insofar as it feels dull and uninspiring. It's not landscape designed to wow the player. The voicework, similarly, doesn't inspire. I don't think anyone talking was a professional voice actor, which probably serves a mil-sim well: not everyone is going to have a nice voice to listen to.
I zone out to the inane ramblings of the squad, but the blue chat from the higher-ups points out some potential trouble ahead. Important to note that all of this took place over a few minutes. ArmA is not the kind of game to drop you into an action film. You might end up in one, but you won't start off with a bang.
Also important to note is that I have played this game before, a long while ago, knowing I'd have to tackle it for this 1001 list. I'm rusty on the controls, having just skim read the list this time around, but the gist of it is that the entire keyboard serves a function, and I hope I won't be tasked with remembering it all for the first mission.
Disembarking at the edge of a town, we hoof it on foot a short way before hitting the deck. I do so not because I've been explicitly ordered to, nor because I saw someone in the distance aim a weapon at me. I do so only because everyone around me did so, and they clearly know more than me. WASD is used for movement, as you'd expect, with QE giving you options to lean and ZXC allowing you to crouch and go prone.
A handy reminder of what a clock looks like pops up on the screen to help me with direction. You and your squad will shout out targets with directional references so that you get your bearings. I'm convinced you can do so manually, but lord knows what the button is. Luckily, I appear to automatically shout things out - assuming I ever see something.
We've been ambushed and some enemy soldiers have been killed. Why has this pleasant holiday island turned back into a warzone? If we live long enough, we might find out. Seeing nobody, I'm left to follow the various waypoints and objective markers as they pop up. But I need to be aware of threats.
Spotting some folks on the horizon, I keep an eye on them. They appear to just be civilians. Nobody else seems concerned with them, so I poke my head through the wall and make my way back towards the rest of the squad.
Or not. One shot, one kill. No idea where it came from. Never will. Such is the fragility of life. Such is the simulation of ArmA. We can retry the mission again and again. If we're going to survive in the real world, we ought to prove that we can survive in the digital one first.
Frustrations
The next attempt did see me shoot someone, though it was lucky that I saw them at all. Like moving, using your weapon has just as many buttons, with options for firing mode, zooming in, looking down the sights and even just raising or lowering it.
My character spotted someone on the horizon, calling out the direction and distance, and sure enough, when I zoomed in and squinted, I saw someone in uniform looking deadly. Well, running sideways, but a target is a target and a couple of rounds later they seemed to be on the floor. Did I hit them? Was it someone else? I have no idea. My rifle bounced around my screen at an almost alarming rate, even firing just a single shot. I think I'll be persuading my targets to die in ArmA, rather than actually killing them.
Ordered to leg it back to safety and leave the area in the back of an armoured vehicle of some kind, I do so, jabbing W until I got into a sprint before climbing aboard and waiting for what felt like an age for the rest of the squad to get here. ArmA is paced in real-time. You may be sprinting around like an idiot in a video game, but the rest of the unit is checking their route and trying to stay alive. It's a good lesson to learn, I'm sure...
Further Fun Times
After another short news segment, the game opens up a little, giving me a choice of missions. Two of which will influence the third. We can try and remove some armoured vehicles so they aren't used against us later, or we can set up a sniper to thin the ranks, or we can do both, and give us an easy time in the main mission.
Everyone likes a sniper rifle, but I'm sure this one is going to be a right pain in the arse to use. Bullet drop? Wind? How much simulation does ArmA care about? Probably all of it. Oh well, let's see how far we get.
We've got a water tower overlooking the route an enemy convoy will take through the area. Get to it, cause some chaos, get out. A simple side mission where every little helps. I'm not sure how much it'll help, but it will, so long as I make it out alive.
These maps have always been a nice part of the ArmA series for me. I may not be able to navigate them very well, but you just don't get stuff like this outside of a mil-sim, for obvious reasons: tightly constrained levels full of action, versus an entire open-world island.
Further Frustrations
With the lead car blown up, the convoy comes to a halt and walks right into our trap. It is up to me, and me alone, to whittle down their numbers, something which proves to be incredibly difficult.
The bullets have to travel all the way over there, so you have to lead your shots, obviously. Your rifle sways so damn much, so you need to go prone to give yourself a chance, but the engine is so funky that you end up clipping off the water tower and floating on thin air. I am sure there's a button to hold your breath and calm yourself down for better accuracy, but if it exists I can't find it.
As if all of that isn't enough, after a couple of shots, the enemy is smart enough to figure out that the giant water tower in the distance with a sniper on it is where the incoming fire is coming from, so they set up their machine guns and open fire as yet more troops start running over here.
It isn't long before the inevitable happens.
Nor is it long before it happens again. You'd have thought that failing a side mission by dying means that you can't do that side mission to make the main mission easier, but no. ArmA seems to want me to keep trying, to the point where I can't navigate the menus to skip this sniper mission.
I'm sure there is a way, but until I find it, I have to use my ingenuity to get past this mission, which I do. By cheating.
Unlocking all the missions so I can skip to the main event, we've been tasked with defending our position from an oncoming horde of enemies - not thinned by a sniper, nor sabotaged by anti-tank weapons. I'm playing on the easy end of the difficulty curve, with ArmA providing lots of customizability for difficulty, from on-screen elements to enemy AI. Even with that, though, we're going to be up against it in this mission.
Armed with a chunky machine gun whose name escapes me, I crouch behind some sandbags and shoot at anything that moves. There's a lot that moves, including my weapon. I can't get three shots off without it aiming to the skies. I bet there's a way to deploy a bipod for increased stability, but you know what I'm going to say next: I don't know how.
After lots of explosions, the scene calms down and we're told that the enemy is flanking elsewhere, and we inexplicably get transported into the back of a truck and shipped off to the next objective. It didn't even order me to run to the truck, it all just happened.
More of the same took place over here on the outskirts of town: shooting at shapes with no hope of hitting them, but hey, you're suppressing their advances, you're doing good. Just keep them occupied and away from town, or whatever the objective is.
Not knowing the objective beyond what your superior last barked out is probably quite accurate to real life. What do I know, though? I'm not a military man. I've have been shot long ago, as we've already seen. I'm hopeless. But could ArmA turn me into something?
I'm not going to find out. After completing the mission, but being told we completed it poorly, I'm stuck with the same three missions to choose from as before, sniping, anti-tank or this main event. It's like Groundhog Day in here, and I'm not equipped to deal with it. Even cheating lead me nowhere, although I could at least use it to hop into new missions to see more of the game.
Final Word
I said after playing Operation Flashpoint that I'm glad I played it because everyone has to play a mil-sim like ArmA at some point. I've played two of them now, one a refinement of the other. What have I learned? That ArmA 2 is better, and I suspect ArmA 3 is even better than that.
I've played some of ArmA 2 because of this 1001 list. The writeup to ArmA even says that ArmA 2 will probably eclipse it because it offers everything ArmA offers - creation tools, adjustable difficulty, multiplayer, whatever - and looks better, plays better, is still just as complicated for those only familiar with Call of Duty.
ArmA: Armed Assault is simply dated. And yet it is so different from every game that I know and am familiar with that I don't really know with any certainty how dated it really is. The menus are awful, the voice work isn't worth writing much about, the animation and feel of your character are clunky, but the experience is like nothing else.
You have to go into an ArmA game with a different mindset, and once you're familiar with it, the sheer amount of stuff you can do is incredible. There's a reason why these games have been modded to the point of spawning games of their own - once you break through the barrier of learning how they work, the rewards you get from the gameplay are almost unique in gaming.
I can only repeat what I said for Operation Flashpoint (really hoping I said something like this now): If you haven't played a mil-sim, find one and play it. Don't pick an old one like ArmA: Armed Assault, though. Treat yourself with a better first-time experience. But play one.
Fun Facts
Sahrani Island serves as a 98km2 battleground for all kinds of missions, many perhaps of your own making.
ArmA: Armed Assault, developed by Bohemia Interactive, first released in 2006.
Version played: ArmA: Gold, PC, 2011.