Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I’m going to be taking a fairly serious amount of time to do a review of this, but I wanted to lob some preliminary impressions up here in the meantime. Blimey, BIS really have got that warzone feel nailed down. This is one of the most atmospheric games I’ve ever played, despite exhibiting a veritable alphabet of atmosphere-breaking elements. The most obvious of these being UNKNOWN. MAN. FAR.
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Blimey. when Jim twittered “These two videos are about the most impressive videogame spectacle you’ll see this month”. He’s not entirely stupid that man. Tim Edwards of PCG found them, and they show some of the sheer scale of the bloody thing. The first video’s the biggest aerial dogfight I’ve ever seen in my life. The second is a 1000 AI battle. ArmA2 is really looking like nothing else. Just look at these…
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Alec and Jim have both had the pleasure of some time with Arma II recently, and so we sat down to discuss our impressions of the formidable-looking soldier game. We even allow ourselves to get a bit giddy before the cynicism sets in. Could Bohemia’s soldier game really be as incredible as it seems? Four-player co-op in a sandbox world appears impressive enough, but with everything else that’s going on… well, what could it mean?
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I was just poring over some of the newer information on the Arma II site, and I realised that we hadn’t posted the major game-footage trailer (below). Now I have to argue – having played a bit of the game for a huge, awesome feature which is in this month’s PCG UK (redesigned mag out next week, fact fans!) – that this isn’t entirely representative of how the game plays. It does look this good, however. You’ll have to go pick up a copy of the mag for my full, honed, beautifully illustrated brain-dump on the subject – and this 4-player co-op soldier-sim in open, living world really is a game worth keeping an eye on. Mmm.
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Bohemia Interactive’s latest game of simulated war is looking pretty healthy, and the latest trailer – which is a mock news bulletin – shows the engine running some pre-scripted scenes. It all looks rather realistic and – dare I say – rather polished. Could BIS actually be delivering a game that doesn’t need to be finished off by the mod community? Hard to say, but even if the game does land in the same kind of state that its predecessor did, we’ve every reason to be excited: this is one of those unfashionably ambitious projects that really makes the PC interesting. There’s no release date for this yet, but we expect an announcement from publisher 505 Games fairly soon.

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