Operation: Flashpoint was probably one of most well-done genre mixing games of it’s time. Recently it’s become a bit of a common practice in the industry to try and mix a variety of gameplay styles together; for example, games like Battlezone 2 and Hostile Waters set new ground in mixing together both RTS and action-style gameplay. But Flashpoint was something special, simply because it was one of the first games in it’s day to offer the ability to fly a UH-60 chopper while simultaneously coordinating a ground attack, and then move on to other actions like leading a mighty tank battalion to support an infantry assault. Sure, there were other games like Battlefield 1942 around that era, but none of them quite offered the same gratifying singleplayer and multiplayer experience that Flashpoint did. Of course, the game’s now utterly ancient, so it makes perfect sense that the developers would push forth a sequel to help maintain their popularity, right?

Well, almost. Some six years later, and you get Armed Assault (better known as ”Arma”), the progeny of what seems to have been a difficult battle for the developers. There are a number of reasons why the game isn’t named Operation: Flashpoint 2, and chief among them being the fact that Codemasters owns the rights to the series and decided to push forward with their own development. But surprisingly, the original team at Bohemia Interactive displayed a level of initiative rare in the industry, creating an all new intellectual property that feels like a follow-up to Operation: Flashpoint. ArmA is probably the closest thing to being a sequel to Operation: Flashpoint without ‘actually’ being a sequel. While Flashpoint provided a great platform for creating a huge variety of mods, maps, and custom content, by today’s standards the engine is unquestionably dated, and the development team did its best to take on the challenge of updating it to meet the demands of today’s industry.

I’ll elaborate on the some of the fancier features as I go on, but first, let’s touch on the single player. ArmA opens up with a nice collection of training levels to guide newcomers into how to play the game. These are pretty well put together for the most part, but surprisingly seem to lack some advanced courses that are important like proper stealth and infiltration tactics (which play a key role in many of the missions – although for me these scenarios mostly translated to reloading my saved game until I could find an inevitable loop-hole in the mission scripting and beat it effortlessly). The campaign then moves on to the actual plot, where you play as a soldier out on a fictional island (again), caught up in the middle of a sudden invasion by hostile forces. Each new ‘chapter’ in the campaign is introduced through a set of slowly-scrolling background images aided by a somber voice-over which actually doesn’t do a bad job of conveying the feelings and experiences the player is going through during the various stages of the game – after all, the goal of ArmA is to provide an immersive and realistic experience for gamers to enjoy - a role I feel it pulls off quite well. As a side note, the new ‘SitRep’ screen is a very nice touch to the campaign, because it unlocks the ability to choose which mission will be played next – often with tangible benefits or consequences that can occur. An example would be taking an optional mission to sneak into an enemy base and sabotage their armor the night before a major assault; doing this will severely weaken the enemy’s offensive capabilities in the next mission.

All of this would be well and good if it was not for a few major problems with the campaign. Not only do the missions tend to ‘flow’ into one another poorly (plot-wise), but there are many inherent scripting problems too - far too many for a game that took this long to develop. A few examples would be getting inexplicably thrown in jail for training due to a “weapons violation” simply for firing the proper weaponry downrange, or having to spend 30 minutes looking for a single target during a night-time base defense mission, simply because one of the enemy saboteurs tasked with sneaking into the base got stuck on a tree somewhere (my own experience with this mission forced me to go into a 10 minute excursion with a stolen vehicle just to try and find him so the mission would finally end). Even worse, one of the campaign missions is widely documented as being effectively impossible to beat without the use of cheat codes due to a flat-out error with the objective scripts, and it’s actually gotten to the point that an official bug tracker has been set up just to keep track of problems like this. Admirably Bohemia is effectively staying on top of things as best they can and releasing updates and beta patches to try and fix these problems as fast as possible, but many of these really shouldn’t have been in the shipped game to begin with. And don’t even get me started on some of the more questionable design choices that aren’t bugs, like missions set up to “teleport” you across the area into the next scripted event / cutscene once a certain task is finished.

But enough nit-picking on the campaign for now – undoubtedly one of the biggest draws of ArmA is in the multiplayer. Given how players have the ability to freely explore an entire island in any given direction and drive or pilot any number of vehicles, the possibilities available for a mission designer are insane. Which is why it’s good that ArmA ships with an updated version of the popular map editor feature from Operation: Flashpoint built right in. Using this, it’s insanely easy to set up a massive mock battle and jump right into the middle of it, or make use of scripts and triggers to create more advanced works of art. And sure, while competing games like Battlefield 2142 might provide a somewhat similar style of gameplay and map possibilities, the majority of these are all focused on versus-based options, while ArmA focuses on the true charm of gaming; co-operative play. “Emergent gameplay” is a buzzword that’s been thrown around the industry pretty often, and it definitely applies to ArmA during a heated multiplayer match when it’s down to just you and your friends to try and take out an entire enemy armored battalion.. Having the ability to hop in any vehicle, steal weapons, lay down ambushes, and possess the physical freedom to take just about any approach to a situation lends itself to some incredibly fun gameplay. It didn’t take long for some crafty player to capitalize on this and create a cool custom mission called ”Evolution” , which is the closest thing to a free-form co-operative campaign across the entirety of one of the game’s islands, and plays out almost similar to the RPG-style Starcraft maps floating around.

This mission is probably one of the coolest things I’ve seen for a given game, but at the same time I hate to give a game accolades for what is actually third-party content created after the fact. This is only out of regret that Bohemia Interactive didn’t recognize the demand for this type of gameplay ahead of time and try to implement their own version of it, as this custom mission required a great deal of codebase workarounds to function properly, as evidenced by the severe stability problems it caused early on. If anything however, this mission simply serves as an incredible testament to how strong ArmA’s community is – a strength the game leverages in increasing its popularity even further. Thankfully the multiplayer network code holds up pretty well, although there are still a fair amount of synchronization goof-ups that can occur relating to vehicular lights or problems with the game’s dynamic day/night cycles which I hope are fixed in the upcoming patches.