Armed Assault Review
Dec 11th, 2006 by Ionia
I was playing Armed Assault online with a friend a few days ago, calling out targets to each other over Teamspeak when somebody from Arsclan hopped in the channel and asked us how we were able to play it (Bohemia Interactive hasn’t found a publisher for the US yet). I told him the only way to get it right now is to import it from Germany, where it’s already been released, but there’s a patch that changes all the in game text to English, so you can actually, you know, play the game without fluency in German.
Armed Assault is the sequel to Operation Flashpoint, Bohemia Interactive’s previous military simulation. It takes place on an island, somewhere, where a new conflict erupts between two fictional nations and happens to involve US troops still stationed there for training. The story of the game is really just a backdrop to provide a loose motivation to go out on missions, taking out targets of the enemy military. I haven’t really played with the single player all that much since they seem to have continued the trend of making the single player campaign missions either devilishly difficult, or nigh impossible to fail. The AI has a habit of picking you off from beyond your visual range with small arms every once in a while, which tends to get really annoying. Other times, they’ll crawl around on the ground aimlessly, never seeing you while you empty half a magazine into the ground around them. So single player is a little spotty. Where the game really shines is multiplayer.
Like Operation Flashpoint, Armed Assault has a robust (although frequently frustrating) mission editor. Placing troops and getting them to move around where you want them to is fairly simple, but there are some things that you will want to do that don’t work without a lot more effort than should be involved. I tried making a mission where enemy soldiers would perform a beach landing with small rubber boats and cut the opposing force in half in the process, but the AI kept insisting on exiting their ships 50 yards from shore, which means they have to dump all their equipment in order to swim to the beach. I’m sure there’s a way to get it to work, but it probably involves a bunch of scripting that I don’t want to deal with for something that should be fairly simple. If you can bend the mission editor to your will, however, you will be able to make some incredibly entertaining scenarios to play with your friends. Which is why I let my friend make all the missions. Ha! We’ve just been playing the two of us against dozens of AI characters and having a blast, but I imagine filling out the ranks entirely with human players would be incredible.
My computer is nowhere close to being up to snuff to handle turning any of the graphics options above their lowest settings, but it still looks a good deal better than Operation Flashpoint. The player models are a lot more detailed and they’ve added a plethora of new effects to visually improve the game. Everything casts a shadow now and the smoke from a burning vehicle both looks much better, and adds a lot to immersion since you can see it in the distance on the other side of a city to let you know that things still exist outside of your current view. They’ve also done a better job of dealing with the interface this time around, with a real menu for picking armaments at ammo crates instead of the list of text options they had in Operation Flashpoint.
There’s still quite a few bugs that need to be worked out. I’ve been running afoul of a bug where all the textures around me get dumped and reloaded for no obvious reason, but my friend hasn’t complained about it at all, so maybe it’s just me. The AI doesn’t really seem to be improved much since Operation Flashpoint and most of the game-play is virtually the same, so it feels a lot like they spent most of their time making a new setting and working on the render engine, but if you liked Operation Flashpoint, Armed Assault will be a good fit for you.