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ArmA: Armed Assault - Gold Edition (PC DVD) | 
 enlarge | From: 505 Games
Category: Video Games
List Price: £29.99
Buy New: £13.02
You Save: £16.97 (57%)
New (3) Used (1) from £13.02
Rating:  2 reviews
Platform: Windows Xp
Genre: military-action-games
Media: Video Game
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.4 x 5.4 x 0.6
EAN: 8023171013053
ASIN: B000V9F4LU
Release Date: November 9, 2007
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Another flawed gem June 27, 2008
Graeme Carter (Ireland)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
This game is the spiritual successor to Operation Flashpoint, just in case anyone doesn't know that. It was made by the same team, using the same engine. The graphics have been tarted up, and the gameplay refined and extended, but it will be very familiar to anyone who has played the original.
Graphically, it is hardly mind blowing. Crysis or even Far Cry are greatly superior. But its not about graphics. The audio is a little messed up, particularly using surround sound. The acting isn't too bad though. But its not about sounds. So what is it about? Gameplay, baby. And this has it in droves. Let me make this much clear: this is not pick up and play. You will die, you will miss, and you will generally suck at this for a little while. Build your skills, play for a while and think like a soldier, then you'll do much better.
This is a big improvement over the old game, with easier to handle vehicles, clearer objectives, and generally more intuitive play. Some of the old bugs remain, however. Enemy A.I. is not so good sometimes. Neither is friendly A.I. for that matter. It sometimes feels like you're the only soldier out there. The realism of combat is most noticeable when the whole thing has been expertly coordinated by a mission writer, but the open ended nature of this game means that the script often falls apart, and the realism goes with it as the A.I. reverts to unscripted actions. When it is real, its a little too real - you simply cannot control a game character like a real person, so you end up very dead, very quick. Many of the missions are made near impossible by this factor. Also, I can't count the number of times I've shown up for a battle to find that its over and all my guys are dead - usually only to receive an order to lead the 'survivors' to assault another camp somewhere. Its also a little buggy - it won't freeze on you AT ALL, but sometimes a mission trigger doesn't go off, and you're left standing with no objective and no way to complete the mission.
That said, just like Operation Flashpoint, this is the closest thing to real that you'll get. Its more like IL-2 Sturmovik, than Ace Combat (if you're into flight sims). More real, less accessible. If you are patient, like military strategy, and don't want to support corporate evil by buying Operation Flashpoint 2, I recommend this. It really should be a 4-star game, but the flaws and bugs and A.I. hold it back.
 Unprecedented realism, but with caveats July 18, 2008
E. P. Reeves (Oxford, United Kingdom)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This game is inevitably going to draw comparison with Operation Flashpoint, since there is a distinct lack of other games which attempt the same level of realism, and offer so few concessions to arcade-style shoot-'em-up-ism. The gameplay is largely the same; some have criticised the complexity of the controls (which I think are actually slightly easier to use in ArmA than OpF), but I think that given a mouse and a keyboard they would be quite hard to simplify. Anyway, you get used to them after a while. ArmA's complexity is a necessary result of its realism. It's a hard game to master: it requires some effort and a bit of patience, but both these are amply rewarded.
The improvements over OpF are, as you would expect, mainly in terms of graphics. Some have knocked ArmA's graphics, but I have to say I was pretty impressed, even given a fairly low-end machine running most of the settings towards minimum. I think graphics is more than just a question of the number of polygons: take the towns for example. In OpF, all the towns looked pretty much the same - a couple of houses placed round a crossroads. In ArmA the topography and variation is far more interesting, you can actually get lost in a town, and the opportunities for hiding, sneaking around and finding good lines of sight is very much increased.
The AI is a bit of a problem, particularly the lack of it for members of your own side, who seem much more adept at getting themselves killed than the enemy. However, many of the problems of tanks going the wrong way etc can be circumvented with a little forethought.
Where ArmA really falls short of OpF is in the campaign. It's too short, for one thing. BI have tried to bring in an element of choice: you can choose to do side missions, and in some missions you can switch between different roles, and back again, part-way through. Both these innovations are mistakes, I think: if a side mission is too hard there is a temptation just to skip it; a compulsory mission would make you work harder, and give more satisfaction on finally completing it. And the character switch detracts from the realism and the empathy one had in OpF with the three or four named characters, one of whom you were always playing.
All in all, the combat environment is more immersive in ArmA than in OpF, simply because of the graphics and the construction of the artificial world, but it's hard really to love the game as a whole. Completing OpF was like seeing an enormous task right through to the end; completing ArmA is like completing all the single missions in OpF.
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