Much like its predecessors, Armed Assault II is a squad-based shooter with a very heavy tactical focus. Unlike other squad-based games where the commands consist mostly of "go here" or "follow me", ArmA II's gimmick is that it gives you complete control over your squad and what they do. This includes everything from telling them who to target, how cautious they should be in moving around, what vehicles to mount, and even to sit down or salute if you so desire. Each and every AI-controlled squad member can basically do anything you can do; although how well they'll do it is another matter completely.

Specific to ArmA II is an all-new campaign with a much more complete storyline that focuses on the exploits of the four-man "Razor Team" and their fight against insurgent forces (and eventually those sneaky Russians) on a fictional post-Soviet island. This campaign has such a stronger focus on mid-mission scripting, dialogue, and well-animated first-person cutscenes that it almost feels more like Call of Duty in some respects - and I definitely mean that in a good way.

Since the series has historically featured somewhat generic storyline threads and mission scripting, it's nice to see more effort put forth in this area. This all combines nicely with the incredible sense of motion you get while playing in the first person - every step taken and breath drawn by your character can be felt or heard, and it's an amazing feeling to dive behind a shrub, roll out, and squint down your gunsights to try and get that one accurate burst. Much like the previous games, you can also hold down the alt key (by default) to swing your head around independently of your character's facing and get a better look at your surroundings. Allegedly folks with a TrackIR-based setup can get a really awesome experience just because of this, which I'll be taking as strong motivation to get one myself one of these days.

As for the campaign missions, what they lack in quantity, they make up for in size. While the first couple of levels can be blown through in a good hour or so, the scale and complexity jumps up significantly after that. It's not long before you're given total command over your squad, access to resources from a fire-base (including cool Hellfire-equipped UAVs), and an increase in responsibility. The average mission to this end might involve an opening scene where you catch an air transport to a field base, get a briefing from the officer in charge where you're tasked with several campaign-level objectives and then given almost complete freedom to roll out and do things however you want. Even later on in the campaign, things open up even more and you get access to some kind of RTS hybrid gameplay mode where you build bases, capture towns, and command other squads on a macro-management level. Theoretically, this makes for missions that can take several hours to complete and are chock-full of exciting content.

However, things rarely go as expected in these missions, and I'm not referring to unexpected plot twists either. I'm not sure what exactly it is about this game's mission scripting that simply causes it to not work half the time, but it's frustrating when events fire at the wrong time (or not at all), causing objectives to inexplicably become impossible to complete. The general rule of thumb for success seems to be to take the fastest, most direct approach possible to completing each objective, and for god's sake don't die or get into a position where you have to load a saved game. Since loading a save is just as likely to randomly break the mission scripting, you're sometimes better off just restarting the level completely. Reaching this realization is immensely disappointing, because the open-ended nature of the campaign otherwise makes it incredibly alluring.

Apart from the ability to play the whole singleplayer campaign in co-op mode (which would have me shouting nothing but gushing praise if it didn't have a tendency to just break the scripting worse), multiplayer is actually a pretty amazing experience because of how nicely it combines with the legendary map editor of this series, which is still just as simple to drop into and set up as it's always been. Within about five minutes you can literally set up a full-scale siege on a city that you can watch and interact with from any perspective imaginable (you can be a goat!), and with a bit more effort you can have a fancy mission briefing, scripted events, and a huge amount of ambience thanks to the new module system ArmA II uses, letting you easily set up dynamically-generated content like interactive civilian life and random battles to go off around the map. Bear in mind as well that some of the hardcore corners of the community are an absolute blast to play with once you get the voice chat going, and you're in for one legendary experience.