Category: PC Gaming

There’s a mission where you just need to ride a mountain bike for 500 meters. Guess they just wanted to show off having bikes.
“Manhattan” is another very open-ended mission. You’re given a couple of suspects, and their schedule, and you’re free to operate however you like.

One suspect gets blown. There’s a killteam sent for the other one. Luckily, we have our M2 machine gun on a Humvee. Although nobody told us to get a Humvee. But there was a Humvee, so why not? There’s also an APC, also pretty effective. But it’s much harder to control.

You can strike a deal with a local priest that stockpiles weapons for selfdefence. ArmA 2 sometimes feels like an RPG, really.
Also, nobody explains that UAV is able to detect enemy vehicles from far away. And there are enemy vehicles at the secret base. Not so secret anymore. You have just a single artillery strike, but it is much more effective than in ArmA 3, and even destroys a tank.
I was told over the radio that the woman I rescued in the first mission was executed by one of the escaped Chedaki leaders. Turns out you can prevent that, if you find him fast enough.
The most annoying bit is that you have to eliminate 4 camps. Only two of which are marked. You’d expect that there is some evidence in the marked camps that point to other ones. Or some evidence on the leader. But no, nothing. The way people finish this mission is by checking all the locations those camps can spawn.

Had to replay the “Harvest Red” mission don’t know how many times, not because it was tough, but because the script announcing about the sniper wouldn’t work.

Many aspects of the game are made better than ArmA 3. First, you got your teammates, that are with you through the campaign, not some random “bots”. Second, you and your teammates don’t die outright from injury. Sometimes there’s time to issue first aid. It makes the fights slightly less chaotic, and also makes you care about them more.
Once useful, if unrealistic feature is that you can control any of your teammates directly. Need to snipe someone? Sure. Need a rain of bullets? No problem. Remembering how many times I had units stuck in walls in ArmA 3, I wish ArmA 3 campaign had the same feature.
Another thing ArmA 2 had: women. And civilians in general. I’ve seen cows blocking the road, I’ve seen farmer driving a tracktor. ArmA 3 feels so baren after that.

“Razor Two” mission was the one where I dropped the game last time, I think. We capture the leaders of the rebels. But the leader of local militia betrays us and releases them, executing commander Miles in the process. We’re tasked with hunting them down. This seems like an optional mission. First, you’re asked if you want to do it. And second, if you kill Bardak, one of the guys that you hunt, the task is considered a failure, but you can progress anyway.
In any case, we jump into a Humvee with a .50, and just hunt for clues. There are just a few enemies you actually have to kill. ArmA at its best.

The only trouble was that the capture script doesn’t trigger very consistently. Cooper can say “there’s no one there”, while Bardak stands in front of him. Then Bardak would try to escape on foot, but Cooper won’t shout for him to surrender. Shooting him in the legs doesn’t help. I mean, it does makes him crawl, but he still wouldn’t surrender. Had to play it a few times until the script finally triggered correctly.

I tried to play that game briefly back in the day, but it was extremely slow on my PC. Guess what, 13 years later, it’s still extremely slow even on the best PC. During an explosion, FPS can drop to single digits on my Ryzen 9 5900X.

This is still a super-impressive game. I started the Red Coast scenario. It seems that I played some other scenario before, because I remember some abandoned factory and camps, but I’m not sure, it was so long ago. At the beginning of the mission, you’re told to grab a laser designator. I couldn’t figure out how to do it with the controls in this game, and it got left in the helicopter. Your mission is to blow a radar truck. But on your way you encouter two militias beating a doctor. You can decide to save him or to ignore this. In a barn, there’s a woman militias raped. You again can decide to help her escape or ignore it.

If you help both the woman and the doctor, they have a dialog. You’re then told that designating the radar is to risky, and would you mind sneaking in and planting charges. Sure, although it took me an FAQ to figure out how to set them. You need to put the charge on the ground, then interact with it immediately and set the timer in 30 seconds increments, as it ticks. Anyway, then command asks if you’re willing to designate another target on the beach. You can agree and then tell them that you forgot the designator, and they’ll call you a shithead. This amount of variability in a game about shooting people is just mindblowing.

Another small surprise: building interiors. In ArmA 3 all the buildings are empty. But here, there are pictures on the walls, and even furniture. It’s quite rare than an older game in the series is more detailed than a newer one.

Completed ArmA 3.
At one point you’re just let loose on an island and asked to wreak havok, picking your insertion point and striking enemy bases.
NATO forces finally appear. They don’t know anything about any captain Miller, it seems.
I don’t know why “Air Superiority” mission gave me more grief, that all the other missions combined. The support APCs got stuck. My AT soldier wouldn’t attack enemy APC, so I had to literally shoot him to get the rocket launcher and blow it myself. Another soldier got stuck in a building, so I couldn’t “evacuate the team”. Had to go back and shoot the bastard. And on top of that, enemies were sniping me like never before.
“Preventive Diplomacy” is designed to be that cool mission, when you’re finally given a powerful antipersonel rifle, you can call in a chopper, you have an armed UAV and artillery support, and your task is to stop enemy counteroffencive. But nobody explains you how to use the antipersonel rifle: it doesn’t shoot where you want it to shoot at 300m, as marksman rifles do. Your chopper doesn’t do much and gets downed by a random jeep. Artillery is pretty random as well, and UAV shoots in the wrong direction half of the time, and is too hard to control. Luckily, not only your APC gets stuck. Most of the enemy APCs got stuck in buildings as well. A major disappointment: explosion that downs a building (yes, the engine supports that) does nothing to a jeep behind it.

Last mission, “Game Over”, could be good: you are again let loose on an island trying to evacuate. You roam gathering weapons, finding vehicles with some gas left, and there are a bunch of optional missions to help soldiers in trouble.

What could go wrong? There’s no “save” option. If you die, you die. In a mission where you literally have to travel kilometers alone, and in a game where you die from a single shot, that’s not a good idea. But that’s not all! At one point, you get a truck, and try to rescue a squad stuck in a swamp. What could go wrong? Mines. The swamp is mined.

In that mission, you need to know exactly what you’re doing. Went to the helipad. There’s no helicopter. Went to nearby port. There were no boats there. Found a gunboat along the coast.

Loaded in. There was no fuel.

Finally, found a Zodiac near the next port.

There are a few missions that let ArmA mechanics really shine, I think. First, you get beached with just a pistol, even without a map, and need to cross a warzone. I ended up finding a machine gun, eliminating a landing helicopter crew, and even finding a map along the way.

In another mission, you’re tasked with setting an ambush, but you’re not told how or where exactly, just the route of the convoy. I ended up blocking a road with my jeep, then setting a couple of charges in the bushes. Front APC tries to pass, gets blown, blocks the convoy, I shoot the truck driver, others hammer the closing APC. All that without any scripts.
Speaking of scripts and blowing things up. In another mission, you’re tasked with stealing a fuel truck. Once you do, Miller the SAS operative contacts you, and asks you instead of delivering it to the rebels, to let one of his men use it to blow an enemy general. If you agree, you can see the entire plan unfold. They could just end the mission there, but they actually decide to script everything, just in case someone like me decide to see the thing go boom.

At one point, you need to choose whether you want to sabotage a repair depot or a helicopter, but you can’t do both. I decided to go for the helicopter, because they are much more annoying. You are expected to lure it with a smoke grenade, then blow it once it lands. But I threw the smoke into the woods by mistake, it tried to land there, and blew itself.

The game uses a very unique control scheme. So unique, in fact, that at first I thought I had issues with my controls. It differentiates between a short press and a long press, for example. So a short RMB press brings up the iron sights, as you’d expect. But a long RMB press zooms in without the sights, apparently simulating a soldier looking into the distance. There are also a lot of combinations using key modifiers: to switch between two types of optics you need Ctrl+RMB. That’s a short RMB, long RMB will do the weird zoom.
Another issue is how realistic drones are. First, you need to assemble your drone. Then you connect to it from your tablet. Then once you finally connected to it, it controls like a helicopter. Meaning that to fly forward, you need to pitch, not able to see much in front of you.
And I was wrong about weapon accuracy. You can be extremely accurate if you stabilize your rifle against cover.

The only way I can summarize the story is “nothing goes according to plan”.
NATO forces are cut off on an “definitely not Greek” island.
We try to capture a communication station – but the equipment is fried.
We try to get ammunition from local guerillas – but the dump is blown.
We stage a naval assault in order to assassinate enemy general – we do assassinate an officer, but not the right one.
We try to establish a beachhead – and get pushed back by enemy helicopters. Enemy soldiers are parachuting from hellos around us. And if all that wasn’t enough: as we try to retreat on a speedboat, it gets blown up.

I remember ArmA games since the times they were still called Operation Flashpont. The original game was so realistic, you could finish one of the missions by just sitting at the back of a truck. And of course everyone remembers the mission when you needed to get back to your squad through occupied territory (the After Montignac mission).
ArmA 3 is not that far away from its roots. You’re more of a witness than an actor, really. Your teammates are more than capable to handle most of the situations themselves. It’s almost impossible to hit anyone farther than 100m. One hit, and you’re dead. I had to limp 100m once to grab a medkit from a body of a soldier I killed in a duel.
One thing that this game gets right is weapon stability. You rarely can hit anything standing. But if you go prone and deploy a bipod (there’s a special command for that), you’re golden.
One major beef I have with the engine, is that it doesn’t handle eye contact at all. Which is not rare, but would help so much with the immersion.

Speaking of immersion, I was completely blown away by Staff Sergeant Adams getting blown on a random mine in the forest. I thought it will be a “Captain Price” kind of character. But I guess this is war.