Arma 3

Senior management have bunkered down, terrified on the top floor of Linux Format Towers as Evan Lahti proclaims: This Means War!

- Evan Lahti

Simulation isn’t the defining aspect of Arma. It’s scale. The enormity of the map is the foundation for the experiences that distinguish Bohemia Interactive’s flagship franchise. It’s what makes radios, binoculars and compasses practical equipment in an FPS. It’s what allows for kilometer-long headshots and coordinated convoy raids. It’s what makes using your eyes to spot hints of enemies as valuable as being a crack shot.

The scale of Arma 3 dwarfs everything in the genre, including Arma 2. Altis is a Mediterranean island-nation assembled from ruins, airports, coastal villages, solar power plants, military outposts, salt flats, and tank-friendly scrubland. It’s a variegated backyard for you to play war in, but what’s more significant is that Arma’s landscape finally has the technology it deserves.

Arma 3 represents an aesthetic overhaul of the series. Dynamic lighting, a volumetric cloud system, genuine vehicle physics, 3D weapon optics, ragdoll, noticeably improved weapon audio, and other grainy, eye-level details await scrutiny inside Arma 3’s macro elegance. The best improvement is the merciful cutting of Arma 2’s rigid, Tin-Man-without-oil combat animations, which makes infantry combat more responsive in your hands. Despite a long development period, long-standing blemishes that arise from its nature as a gargantuan simulation linger. Even on reasonable hardware, frame rates can dip under the spectacle of some multiplayer missions. Friendly AI units, though marginally better-behaved, still depend on the player to be their brains, an issue that’s circumvented by playing Arma cooperatively.

Operation cooperation