ARMA II Singleplayer (REVIEW)

Being a former lover of Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis, I was stunned (yes! stunned!) by all the unhappy reviews of Armed Assault II. And so, finally, I have played a day's worth of Armed Assault II to make my own opinion.

My opinion is that the singleplayer portion of Armed Assault II is unhappy.

Armed Assault II's singpleplayer is basically Operation Flashpoint's singleplayer with better graphics and worse writing.

In the campaign, you play as a modern day, Force Recon marine being manly behind the lines of a "communist" division of retards who've failed to realize that the Soviet Union died. Said division has also failed to realize that trying to defeat today's United States military, conventional warfare-style, is even dumberer.

To balance this out, your spec ops team of manliness (Team Razer) is incidentally also composed of dumbasses. They are so dumbfoundingly stupid that I wonder if Bohemia Interactive intended it. Example of their stupidness: When we spec ops goons were in the huey helicopter flying towards the LZ for our first mission, one of them asked "So what's the terrain like?" And then his ex-teammates didn't throw him off the helicopter for being the worst commando in the universe.

HE'S ON THE HELICOPTER HEADED FOR THE LZ AND NOW HE'S ASKING WHAT THE TERRAIN'S LIKE?...

Later on they marines continued to say a bunch of retarded, gung-ho things in weak-body, nerd accents. And often their sayings would make no sense given what they had just said. Here's an example (not an exact quote): "Get you're (bad word) (badword) together marine. The enemy isn't going to make it easier on you when you fail to do stuff." Followed by, "Meesa like ice cream!" Does Bohemia Interactive think humans talk like that? NO! What happened is that they worked hard on making the Direct X 9 version of Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis, and not on writing dialogue that should exist. 


The writing wasn't good in Flashpoint either, but at least I was younger and retardeder when I played that one. I don't recall it being this horrid.

[I have positive things to say: three years after its release, Arma II runs pretty well, even on today's low-end gaming PCs. Also, the forests look really foresty; given the history of computer games forests, this is quite an accomplishment. Also, I like Bohemia Interactive. Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis was one of the best games I ever played.]

Now pretend that you ask, "But what about Operation Arrowhead? The U.S. Army in 'Takistan' campaign?" Well, I couldn't get myself to play it. But before you dismiss this review as tripe, here's why I couldn't: Arma II's singleplayer missions and tutorials failed to activate mission-and-tutorial-ending triggers 4/10 times on my machine. So, uh, yeah I didn't want to play an entire campaign of potentially-4/10-times-the-level-won't-end-for-some-buggy-reason. Back when I was a kid I might have, but again, kids are stupid.

So why buy Armed Assault II: Combined Operations if you're not going to play Day Z? Right now I don't know. I imagine that the coop or team vs. team multiplayer might be cool, with it's playing-military-with-actual-non-Team-Razer-people. Although I do fear that multiplayer missions won't end 4/10 times.