Arma 3 Review

You know, I'm starting to feel like modern military shooters might be finally doing some good in the world. I'm prepared to forgive their butchery of the first-person shooter, see, because it seems they've finally grown up enough to try and convince people that war is shit. Spec Ops gets the honorary mention for its story arc and that particular scene, of course, but even the latest Call of Duty had a modicum of self-awareness nestled amongst all the rampant nationalism. That was all just storytelling, though, and stories are unreliable things that are open to interpretation. Gameplay is much more conducive and solid in that respect: a horror game with an unnerving story is good, but a horror game that forces you to do something unnerving is much more deserving of being pigeonholed thus. Arma 3 earns a gold star, then, for having actual gameplay that showcases why sending people off to join the army is a bad idea – specifically because they'll be overwhelmed by tedium for hours on end. And shot by somebody they never saw.

For the uninitiated, Arma 3 is the tactical first-person shooter equivalent of games like Euro Truck Simulator or Train Simulator: a quiet endeavour towards realism and authenticity over the troublesome business of gameplay design. Unlike such titles, however, you aren't bringing in the harvest or delivering paraffin to Lancaster in the driving rain, but instead wallowing in the more familiar gaming territory of exacting military-approved murder upon your fellow man via miscellaneous ordinance. So in much the same way that Euro Truck Simulator never had missions in which you ram a competitor's truck off the road or race a light aircraft across Europe, Arma 3 doesn't include ridiculous quick-time-event fight sequences with eyepatch-wearing Russian masterminds. It's easy to just dismiss this as one for the hobbyists and call it a day, but I feel it's probably better to investigate what the average consumer might gain from the game.

This is normally the part where I'd lead in with a description and some light teasing about the single player campaign, but sadly the single player appears to have gotten a bit tipsy and fallen into a ditch because it isn't actually there at all. A bit of professional journalistic research (read: thirty seconds of half-hearted Google searching) reveals that the campaign will actually be released over the next few months as free DLC episodes, and really, am I the only person a little bit annoyed about this? Yes, it doesn't cost you anything, and yes, it's better than rushing the damn thing to meet deadlines, but is it okay to just leave out such an integral part of the game with the promise it'll turn up in the future? I mean honestly, Bohemia Interactive, you're not Valve: people aren't going to custard pie you in the streets for pushing the release date back. Hacking off major parts of the game that haven't fully grown yet and presenting it as a finished product seems like the consequence of insufficient resources. It'd be like realizing you don't have enough metal to finish the roof on a car and simply selling it as a convertible with the promise of following up with the roof at some point in the future: it’s better than no roof at all, but that'll be little comfort when you’re being soaked to the bone by torrential rain.

So right now Arma 3 is essentially almost a multiplayer-exclusive title, but that's really not as problematic as it sounds. Usually releasing a standalone multiplayer game that hasn't been trumpeted from the rooftops would be comparable to angling in the wake of a convoy of fishing trawlers, but Arma 3 sails merrily through clutching the twin shining keys to multiplayer gaming: a widespread community and strong mod support. I was surprised to find servers within a playable range and even more astounded to discover a decent number of players on them. That might've just been a dream, though, because the people I was playing with seemed to be polite, patient and completely forgiving in the event of disasters on my part,, which ranks them somewhere above unicorns in the Tourist's Pocket Guide To Mythical Creatures From The Astral Realm.

Gameplay is essentially everything the Arma series has led us to expect so far – that is to say, hyper-realistic first-person military combat in an environment roughly five times the size of the entire known universe. This time it's the fictional Mediterranean islands of Altis and Stratis, two dusty volcanic rocks laced with picturesque towns and boxy utilitarian military bases (both of which are severely lacking in interior furniture). Missions are nicely varied, making use of the terrain wherever possible, alternating between the various flavours of warfare – sneaky guerrilla squad tactics, widespread assaults, vehicular combat, extended skirmishes, underwater gunfights, that sort of thing – and manage to be quite organic in their execution, letting you approach objectives with relative freedom of movement. I'm not just throwing 'freedom of movement' around idly, either: theoretically there's nothing to stop you turning on your heels and sprinting over the hills like a panicked deserter, though your team-mates will probably get a bit narky if you use the only functional tank as your getaway vehicle.

Eventually I grew sufficiently unnerved by the patience of my allies and took refuge in the single player showcase, a set of various missions designed partially, I suspect, as a conciliatory measure for not showing up with a real single player campaign, but officially as a method of showing off Arma 3's multiple flavours of gameplay. User-generated content missions are available too, already waist-deep as of time of writing, but with no offense to the dedicated community members involved in them, this review just covers the parts of the game that Bohemia Interactive was actually responsible for. This sort of business tends to be a bit more heavily scripted than the multiplayer missions, leading you along a sequence of more strictly defined objectives like a marionette on a string, though in the big scheme of things that's still several light years away from the 'cinematic' first person shooters of today.

Being on your own also means that you have to rely on the AI and can't just tag along the player with the serious-looking clan tags, though thankfully your computer-controlled squad allies do seem to balance helpfulness with the ability to let the player feel in control for the most part, at least when you get slotted into the position of the commander and not just a faceless drone. They'll follow you blindly around at a respectful distance like a horde of shy fanboys, but once the bullets start flying they'll spread out, take cover and spot foes from several miles away with their apparently cyber-augmented eagle eyes before firing. It felt like I was leading a group of competent self-sufficient allies who still recognized that they weren't supposed to be driving events, which was a breath of refreshing air after the inhaling the foul stench that The Bureau's AI exuded from every pore.

It's a good thing the AI can look after itself, too, because manipulating them from the ground is apparently something the game decided was to be left as an exercise for the player, along with almost everything else. There's a definite deficit in tutorials or guidance, which in a game as deep as this is like flinging the player off the White Cliffs of Dover with a brick tied to each foot and asking them to swim butterfly stroke. Despite the spacebar functioning as an all-purpose context-sensitive 'use' button, your controls cover more pages than the EULA and manage to be almost as impenetrable. Occasionally a quick dialogue box will flash up during a specific section in the aforementioned showcase, but they're rarely comprehensive or explanatory enough to give the full story. I ended up breaking the flow every now and then in order to check my key-binds and make sure that pressing a certain button would cause my helicopter to do a triple somersault and not pile-drive itself into the ground.

Don't worry too much about that, though. Chances are that if you do forget how to do something, you'll have time to stop, open the options menu, find the manual, get up, make a cup of tea, come back, write some hyperbole on the internet for a bit and still be able to work it out before anybody finds and shoots you. To say that Arma 3 tends to progress at a sedate pace is to fail to express the sheer volume of plodding monotony that infuses its gameplay. You could spend an eternity just trekking across the landscape if you're unfortunate enough to be denied vehicle support, and once you get to your objective you'll find that the best course of action is to stop about a mile away and painstakingly slither towards it on your belly using only the contractions of your manly pectorals, stopping every now and then to listen and make sure you aren't about to come face to toes with a burly enemy trooper.

Long-range combat is a soulless sniping festival while close-quarters combat tends to completely flip the pacing switch, becoming hectic, confused, and usually a matter of who spotted who first.I'm sure it's all very realistic and tactical and other words doubtless plastered all over the marketing material, but unless you have a very specific frame of mind it's nowhere near what you'd call entertaining. Your fragile human body takes damage about as well as a biscuit takes hot tea, so gameplay tends to be intensely unforgiving to even the slightest slip-up. There's satisfaction to be gained here in perfectly executing manoeuvres in the face of such overwhelming odds, of course, but it's usually not enough to justify the number of abject failures you'll experience. Where is the entertainment value, I ask you, in stepping out of cover for a second and being punished by a swarm of angry bullets because you didn't locate the one particular smudge on the horizon that was an enemy soldier?

Oh, but being a squishy mortal is only half the story. Arma 3 just loves to play with its military technology, and at the center of its mass of riveted steel and camouflage paint is its vehicular warfare. You have the usual business – APCs, quad bikes, tanks, helicopters, speedboats – but also more exotic solutions like drones, UAVs and even a mini-submarine. Driving these around actually goes part of the way to solving Arma 3's most glaring issues to an outsider like myself, since you can now move at a respectable pace and you actually have something protecting your vital organs other than a comfortable woolly vest. In one scenario I barreled down a hill at full speed in an armoured van, rammed through the front gates of a military base, switched to the grenade turret and promptly covered everything that moved in a soothing blanket of fireballs. Gratifying? Absolutely, and it was all the sweeter knowing that a designer somewhere was jumping up and down in fury because I'd actually taken advantage of the game's open-endedness instead of just following whatever the correct military protocol for this sort of thing is.

Eventually all of this has to slither out of your computer and into your face in order to make you perceive it as part of this miserable mortal coil, so how well does Arma 3 accomplish this task? Well, it's the same mantra as the rest of the game: realism, realism, realism, and of all the things that have to chant that at the top of their lungs, the visuals suffer the most for it. It's a microcosm for the problem of this brand of aesthetics, where the lighting is crisp and the polygons are a-plentiful but all they're being used to render is an expensive gun barrel over a dry, unremarkable landscape. I get a face-full of reality every time I look out the window, so I hope you'll forgive me if seeing Arma 3 faithfully recreate a boxy utilitarian military base doesn't exactly set my optic nerves ablaze. Still, setting it in a cel-shaded depiction of Narnia would be a bit of a departure from tone, so let's just say no more about it.

Looking at the smaller details reveals something of a mixed bag. Weapons look and sound responsive, sunlight bleaches the ground until it feels like your monitor's going to give you a suntan, and artillery shots land with unannounced grace loudly enough to make you leap out of your chair and take refuge under the desk, but the longer you look the more the engine’s relative age shows. Real Virtuality 4, as it is bafflingly known, is but the latest iteration in a line that stretches all the way back to the original Arma and its precursors, and it’s starting to look a bit weary under all the makeup. Spend too much time lying in the brush and you’ll notice the way the ground textures stretch and distort underfoot, or the way destroyed structures simply sink into the ground like they’re answering the call of the Mole People. On the occasion that things start to heat up and more than a handful of entities start getting rendered on-screen, you can practically hear the old foundations creak as the framerate drops alarmingly.

Arma 3 comes across as an impressive game, but that's not the unequivocal praise it sounds like: it's well-polished, changes things up often enough and is frankly frighteningly deep, but the effort is slightly misplaced, the videogame equivalent of restoring a beautiful vintage car just so you can drive it into a swimming pool. It offers so much – from underwater gunplay to helicopter dogfights, from tactical coordinated assaults to sneaky assassinations – but if you say “Great! That sounds fun!” the game just looks at you with a perplexed expression and checks its pocket dictionary. It has an excellent grasp on how to be a simulation, but not such a strong grip on what it means to be a game. At any rate, it doesn't really make attempts to meet a mainstream audience halfway, and when I look back at what's happened in the past to games that tried to meet mainstream audiences halfway, that's honestly something to be respected. I mean, if you're into hardcore military simulations then Christmas has arrived early for you on the back of a camouflaged gunmetal-grey Land Rover, but to the average player it's a game to warily observe before diving in. When all's said and done I had bouts of genuine fun in Arma 3 and it fills the niche it's carved out for itself wonderfully, so if it sounds like the kind of thing you might enjoy then you probably will enjoy it. I could elaborate further for those that are still on the fence, but I've had the game running in the background for the last hour and I think somebody might be finally shooting at me.