Arma 3 Review

Be all that you can be. 

I’ve heard people who served say that your time in the military is what you make of it. Arma III, a deep combat simulator, is the same in that it largely asks you to make your own fun using its vast array of meticulously recreated military hardware and gorgeous, expansive battlefields. It requires great effort and patience before you can derive any amount of what you’d traditionally think of as gameplay from it, though. What it offers in return is multiplayer that’s sometimes very impressive and completely unique, but it’s also convoluted in ways that cannot be excused with aspirations to realism.

I knew what to expect going into Arma III from previous experience with Bohemia Interactive games, yet I was still overwhelmed by the amount of features I had to wrap my head around before I could play it with even moderate proficiency. It’s a first-person shooter alright, but it’s not another “left trigger to aim down the sights, right trigger to shoot” kind of game. You’re going to have to use almost every key on your keyboard, memorize specific key combinations and what each does depending on whether you’re on foot, in a tank, a helicopter, etc.
I felt comically inept fumbling through my first few hours. With so many different firing modes, stances, movement speeds, and other options, I had difficulty just walking, drawing my weapon
and firing, to say nothing of using my equipment, making sense of the map, and working with my squad. I had to wonder what my AI squadmates thought of me, the clueless rookie, stumbling into the bushes before I accidently pulverized myself with a satchel charge I didn’t even mean to deploy. To make matters even more difficult, in its current state Arma III doesn’t offer a real tutorial. Its Showcases (playable scenarios showing off its many features) follow a logical progression that introduce you to increasingly complicated mechanics. However, they each do a poor job of explaining how to use them or how they may be useful later on. The only real instruction comes in the form of on-screen hints that tell you which keys do what. It’s an inefficient method to teach you how to fly a helicopter, and practically useless when it comes to explaining the tactical value of more esoteric equipment and features.
In one of the more interesting Showcases you are given access to a non-lethal aerial drone and an armed ground vehicle drone which you can use to eliminate targets in a nearby town. After much experimentation, I devised a tactic of sending my aerial drone ahead to scout and tag targets, which then allowed me to coordinate mortar fire and corner enemies in the town. It was satisfying because it allowed me come up with a strategy which felt entirely my own, and one which nearly no other shooter could accommodate. On the other hand, there was a needless amount of frustration along the way that could have been avoided with clearer UI and better instruction.

As you can imagine, Arma III’s potentially much more enjoyable when you’re playing online with real people – especially those who already know how to play and can teach us its secrets. It doesn’t have a capped player limit, so in theory a server where 100 players are facing another 100 players in a gigantic sandbox where almost everything is possible is one of the best shooters I’ve ever played. But without investing long-term in a clan or other group that will ensure a reliable team of significant size, those are hard to come by. In practice, new players are presented with a list of servers half-full of random people who aren’t communicating, and where everything that can go wrong is going wrong. Since Arma III doesn’t offer obvious incentives for players to cooperate or even funnel them to the same areas of its enormous maps, multiplayer’s mostly uncurated chaos. It’s amusing in its own way, but something I would rather watch in a YouTube video than it play myself.
Counterintuitively, smaller matches are more fun for a new player trying to find his way in this world. In one pick up co-op game, six fellow players and I (and a group of AI bots) were tasked with a simple mission: find a way off the island. We spawned at a random spot along the coast and were given two locations, miles away, where we could find a boat or a helicopter for extraction. We ended up not even making it halfway to either destination, but I enjoyed our journey quite a lot. We heard a gunship in the distance and dashed across a field to take cover in a forest. We stumbled upon and successfully seized an enemy outpost, where we commandeered a truck. We arrogantly tried repeating the same strategy with a larger town on our way to an airfield... and were caught in the open by snipers. This is what developers mean when they talk about emergent gameplay, and it’s where Arma III shines.

Altis and Stratis, the two islands that serve as its massive military sandboxes (270 km² and 20 km² respectively), are truly impressive and the foundations that make everything else about ARMA 3 possible. Whether you’re scuba diving to disable mines or sniping from a church atop a high hill, everything looks crisp and sufficiently believable... as long as you don’t look too close. There’s an obvious amount of recycled assets used to fill all this space, and many empty buildings. With its overall clinical style, Arma III can seem sparse, even boring when you stop to smell the roses.
Its sound design, however, is disappointing at any distance. It suffers from laughably cheesy electronic music and sound effects that make some actions feel insignificant, vehicle movement and firing in particular. For all I know that’s what tanks and helicopters really sound like, but it makes them feel like toys.
But like I said, this is a game where we have to make our own fun, and at least Arma III makes that much relatively easy with a built-in mission editor and Steam Workshop integration. It’s inherited the modding community that brought us such hits as DayZ, and as its marketing materials insist, Arma III really is a “platform” more than a stand-alone game, and what it may evolve into in the months and years after release adds immeasurable replay value to its $60 asking price.

Arma III is a good game, but I can’t help but lament the opportunity it misses by not making itself just a tad more approachable. There’s a need to turn the whole shooter genre on its head, or better yet just give it a good solid kick in the rear. Since what it lacks most is direction, Bohemia made a mistake by not waiting for the single-player campaign content (which will come later in three free DLC updates) before launch. At the moment, you have to overcome too many obstacles before you can understand what’s so great about it, and few will have the patience to get there.