ArmA 2

Completed ArmA 2.
Another game I never expected to complete.
There’s a mission where you need to capture four villages. It’s literally “capture the flag”. Around each village there are a few bunkers, and after staying in one for a minute, its flag is changed. The fun, albeit unrealistic bit, is that you can construct defences immediately. Dropping Zu-23 by a recently captured bunker allows you to mow down any and all resistance.
You also get opportunity to buy weapons, including anti-tank ones. This is important, because no one in your squad is equipped with one of those. And while you can beat technicals or even a helicopter with a light machine gun and some luck, you can’t do anything to an APC.
Russians send their army. Interestingly, they also block off some of the roads. Razor Team is officially declared MIA.
We help the partisans. Although they also ask to kill their leader. Turns out to be the same “priest” we helped out earlier. He’s a radical, and is not very helpful. We leave his corpse in the forest.
Last mission is a slog. Your goal is to capture an entire region, some 20 villages, instead of just 4. You’re given access to BTR2, T72 and helicopters, though. But still, enemy base is crawling with those T72s as well.
Interestingly, in this mission your team mates and you switch to Russian weapons.
Also, I’ve read that if you collect all evidence in all missions, NATO sends you some tanks to help. I didn’t manage to do that, though. Had to resort to offensive defence tactic instead.
The problem with destroying the enemy HQ is that this game is not built for enemy APCs popping out of thin air in front of you. Your tank runs out of ammo. They don’t. HQ is also extremely sturdy, Took more than 5 direct hits from T72 to destroy it.
After that, the mission is half broken. No one explains to you how to negotiate with Russians. Marny, despite what the mission says, doesn’t have any dialogue lines. If you take a chopper to a remote island, you’ll find Lopotev there. But your teammates will shoot him, because someone forgot to designate him as neutral NPC. And once you manage to capture him all by yourself, half of the time he won’t get into the helicopter.
One last fun bit. You’re tasked with transferring Lopotev to Russians for interrogation. But they set an ambush for you. But I had a chopper nearby, and that was the only time it worked well. Spetsnaz didn’t know what hit them.
Speaking of Spetsnaz, they have nice toys on them, like Bizon and Vintorez. A bit of a shame, really, that’s the last minute of the game, so you never get to play with them. Same with 12.7 rifles. Seen some ammo, never seen the rifle itself.

I mentioned that the game is still extremely slow even on the strongest PCs. Well, not if you reduce the draw distance. You cannot hit anything beyond few hundred meters anyway, so 2km should be fine. Also, I completely disable grass in the last mission, simply because I couldn’t see all those soldiers protecting Lopotev.

As flawed as this game was, especially the last mission, I still greatly enjoyed it, though.