Rick Lane

A Wild Helicopter Appears! You use Rifle. It's not very effective.

Armed Assault 2 is a tough game to love, but love it I do. Ridiculously lofty in its ambitions and stubbornly determined to present the gritty realities of war, the bizarrely abbreviated ArmA 2 is not a game for the faint of heart or the short of patience. I can honestly say that ArmA 2 contains the most sublime portrayal of warfare I’ve ever experienced in a game. Unfortunately, its potential brilliance is severely hampered by crippling bugs and, in some instances, its own misguided aspirations.

Bohemia Interactive Studios have always been fully committed to developing the most authentic military simulator possible given the limitation that, well, dying in real life is pretty final. The trouble is that they already did this almost a decade ago with Operation Flashpoint and its subsequent expansions. Sometimes I wish BI Studios had left it at that. ArmA, the spiritual sequel to Operation Flashpoint, can rather generously be described as half-baked (and ungenerously described as complete rubbish).

Resultantly it was with some trepidation that I laced my boots, flicked the safety off my rifle and charged into the first mission of ArmA 2, a midnight reconnaissance mission in the civil war ravaged country of Chernarus. Needless to say, charging in was a stupid idea. The village my Special Forces team (named Razor) was ordered to reconnoitre turned out to be infested with jittery-fingered enemy soldiers and I was promptly gunned down from several places at once.

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