July 3rd, 2009

ArmA II’s Real Virtuality Engine

Bohemian Interactive continues its former owned series of Operation Flashpoint with ArmA II with the same approach to realism, though it fails in its usability and accessibility. The game takes place in Chernarus, a fictional area located in Eastern Europe; the player’s role is that of a leader of the US marine recon squad who is sent as part of a larger force to lend a helping hand in a civil war between communist Russians, Chernarus democratic leaders and a number of guerilla groups.

The game allows you to take command, this feature is quite new for the Bohemian Interactive games, and it proves to be working well so long as it gives the player a certain degree of involvement next to a whole range of responsibilities. The command system is loaded of options and flexibility but the negative thing is that you can not be instantly familiarized with it since it is covered by so many layered menus that it may take you few days before you start to know it better. During your performance you have the good feeling of being an important part of the plot as you carry a lot of individual contributions. The strategy you are supposed to build and taking the decisions are the features that give strength to the character and significance to the game’s world.

You face situations where you need to decide what is the best to do in the given circumstances, and your decisions do not have to lead to creating chaos or collateral damages that will stain your integrity, you must think of ways to avoid these consequences. The game is quite generous in this matter offering you choices to get to the objectives in your own way, adding also bonuses and opening new challenges that are based on your decisions. But there are situations when triggers don’t always work correctly in that they can make you loose a fight without you or your mates being involved in some way, and this is kind of frustrating.

The game is wealthy in providing chances to drive T-72s, laser designators to pick out targets on a distant location, and possibilities to climb to heights being armed with sniper riffles. The graphics is very impressive while defining the ballistics model, but the vehicle physics is not so well rendered. The game’s armory mode gives you the ability to take out anything for a test drive and run some interesting mini-challenges.

It is the ArmA II’s Real Virtuality engine which the game currently uses that allows you to see the expressivity on soldiers’ faces and the detailed elements that are part of the environment. As a conclusion, ArmA II presents a difference between the accuracy of the military hardware and the broken nature of the elements that constitute the missions, not to mention that the player has sometimes the feeling that the scores that he gathers are not always representative, and together with the inelegant interface of the game they all make the sum of the flaws that ArmA II offers.