ArmA 2 Review
01.03.2023
ArmA 2 is the sequel to ArmA: Armed Assault, and for those of you who haven't heard of the title, it's a military shooter that puts a strong accent on realism. The new game in the series raises the bar even further when it comes to realistically depicting the situation on a battlefield, and gives the player even more freedom of choice for completing the missions.
Gameplay
The single player campaign takes place in a fictional country with a modern-day setting, and spans over a small number of missions that can be completed in several hours by more experienced players. Most of the enjoyment from this title comes from its online play, which has been emphasized on very heavily. The game is very varied and realistic, offering more than 70-80 different weapons, each replicas of their real-life counterparts almost down to the bolt. Their behavior is simulated on a very good level as well, with bullets losing their speed over a long trajectory, forcing the player to “lead” their shots over distance.
There are also lots of vehicles available to the player at any time as well, ranging from civilian ones to military vehicles like tanks and jeeps, and even airplanes at some points. This may sound too similar to the Battlefield series for some, but you must play with ArmA 2′s vehicles to see what realism in a military game really means – the way they're depicted is really impressive.
Graphics and System Requirements
The Real Virtuality 3 engine used isn't very popular with developers, and there are only a handful of games using it. Still, it offers great graphics quality, especially when it comes to rendering particle effects, support for textures of very high resolutions and various grades of depth mapping, and also high-polygon models that give a sense of realism to everything.
The engine is highly optimized too, able to run on some older machines that would normally struggle with games of this age – if you lower your graphics settings appropriately, of course. The major bottleneck here seems to be the processor, which the engine is very demanding on – so if you want to get the most out of it and enjoy it with good, stable framerates, maybe you should consider investing in a better processor if your current one isn't up to par.
Other
Those of you who enjoy mods (modifications for games) should find ArmA 2 to be quite delightful in this aspect, as it gives a great degree of freedom to modders, and the community is constantly coming out with new content for it, which attributes to the game's longevity to a great extent and in case you get bored with the regular modes of play, you can just hop in a random mod and experience the game in a different manner.
Conclusion
Military shooters are quite numerous today – and some of the new ones seem to just tread on the same old roads, trying to milk gamers of their money by adding several new weapons and calling it a new game – and in that situation, ArmA 2 really shines with its uniqueness.