I tried to play that game briefly back in the day, but it was extremely slow on my PC. Guess what, 13 years later, it’s still extremely slow even on the best PC. When a vehicle explodes, FPS can drop to single digits on my Ryzen 9 5900X.
This is still a super-impressive game, though. I started the Red Coast scenario. It seems that I played some other scenario before, because I remember some abandoned factory and camps, but I’m not sure, it was so long ago. At the beginning of the mission, you’re told to grab a laser designator. I couldn’t figure out how to do it with the controls in this game, and it got left in the helicopter. Your mission is to blow a radar truck. But on your way you encouter two militias beating a doctor. You can decide to save him or to ignore this. In a barn, there’s a woman militias raped. You again can decide to help her escape or ignore it.
If you help both the woman and the doctor, they have a dialog. You’re then told that designating the radar is to risky, and would you mind sneaking in and planting charges. Sure, although it took me an FAQ to figure out how to set them. You need to put the charge on the ground, then interact with it immediately and set the timer in 30 seconds increments, as it ticks. Anyway, then command asks if you’re willing to designate another target on the beach. You can agree and then tell them that you forgot the designator, and they’ll call you a shithead. This amount of variability in a game about shooting people is just mindblowing.
Another small surprise: building interiors. In ArmA 3 all the buildings are empty. But here, there are pictures on the walls, and even furniture. It’s quite rare than an older game in the series is more detailed than a newer one.
Other aspects better than ArmA 3: First, you got your teammates, that are with you through the campaign, not some random “bots”. Second, you and your teammates don’t die outright from injury. Sometimes there’s time to issue first aid. It makes the fights slightly less chaotic, and also makes you care about them more.
Once useful, if unrealistic feature is that you can control any of your teammates directly. Need to snipe someone? Sure. Need a rain of bullets? No problem. Remembering how many times I had units stuck in walls in ArmA 3, I wish ArmA 3 campaign had the same feature.
Another thing ArmA 2 had: women. And civilians in general. I’ve seen cows and goats blocking the road, I’ve seen farmer driving a tracktor. ArmA 3 feels so baren after that.
“Razor Two” mission was the one where I dropped the game last time, I think. We capture the leaders of the rebels. But the leader of local militia betrays us and releases them, executing commander Miles in the process. We’re tasked with hunting them down. This seems like an optional mission. First, you’re asked if you want to do it. And second, if you kill Bardak, one of the guys that you hunt, the task is considered a failure, but you can progress anyway. You can guess how I discovered that.
In any case, we jump into a Humvee with a .50, and just hunt for clues. There are just a few enemies you actually have to kill. ArmA at its best.
The only trouble was that the capture script doesn’t trigger very consistently. Cooper can say “there’s no one there”, while Bardak stands in front of him. Then Bardak would try to escape on foot, but Cooper won’t shout for him to surrender. Shooting him in the legs doesn’t help. I mean, it does makes him crawl, but he still wouldn’t surrender. Had to play it a few times until the script finally triggered correctly.
Scripts issues are still very common. Had to replay the “Harvest Red” mission don’t know how many times, not because it was tough, but because the script announcing about the sniper wouldn’t work.
There’s a mission where you just need to ride a mountain bike for 500 meters. Guess they just wanted to show off having bikes.
“Manhattan” is another very open-ended mission. You’re given a couple of suspects, and their schedule, and you’re free to operate however you like.
One suspect gets blown. There’s a killteam sent for the other one. Luckily, we have our M2 machine gun on a Humvee. Although nobody told us to get a Humvee. But there was a Humvee, so why not? There’s also an APC, also pretty effective. But it’s much harder to control.
You can strike a deal with a local priest that stockpiles weapons for selfdefence. ArmA 2 sometimes feels like an RPG, really.
Also, nobody explains that UAV is able to detect enemy vehicles from far away. And there are enemy vehicles at the secret base. Not so secret anymore. You have just a single artillery strike, but it is much more effective than in ArmA 3, and even destroys a tank.
I was told over the radio that the woman I rescued in the first mission was executed by one of the escaped Chedaki leaders. Turns out you can prevent that, if you find him fast enough.
Chedaki are basically like DNR in Ukraine, Russian backed terrorists. But the game was released way before Russian invasion in 2014.
The most annoying bit is that you have to eliminate 4 camps. Only two of which are marked. You’d expect that there is some evidence in the marked camps that point to other ones. Or some evidence on the leader. But no, nothing. The way people finish this mission is by checking all the locations those camps can spawn.
Another game I never expected to complete.
There’s a mission where you need to capture four villages. It’s literally “capture the flag”. Around each village there are a few bunkers, and after staying in one for a minute, its flag is changed. The fun, albeit unrealistic bit, is that you can construct defences immediately. Dropping Zu-23 by a recently captured bunker allows you to mow down any and all resistance.
You also get opportunity to buy weapons, including anti-tank ones. This is important, because no one in your squad is equipped with one of those. And while you can beat technicals or even a helicopter with a light machine gun and some luck, you can’t do anything to an APC.
Russians send their army. Interestingly, they also block off some of the roads. Razor Team is officially declared MIA.
We help the partisans. Although they also ask to kill their leader. Turns out to be the same “priest” we helped out earlier. He’s a radical, and is not very helpful. We leave his corpse in the forest.
Last mission is a slog. Your goal is to capture an entire region, some 20 villages, instead of just 4. You’re given access to BTR2, T72 and helicopters, though. But still, enemy base is crawling with those T72s as well.
Interestingly, in this mission your team mates and you switch to Russian weapons.
Also, I’ve read that if you collect all evidence in all missions, NATO sends you some tanks to help. I didn’t manage to do that, though. Had to resort to offensive defence tactic instead.
The problem with destroying the enemy HQ is that this game is not built for enemy APCs popping out of thin air in front of you. Your tank runs out of ammo. They don’t. HQ is also extremely sturdy, Took more than 5 direct hits from T72 to destroy it.
After that, the mission is half broken. No one explains to you how to negotiate with Russians. Marny, despite what the mission says, doesn’t have any dialogue lines. If you take a chopper to a remote island, you’ll find Lopotev there. But your teammates will shoot him, because someone forgot to designate him as neutral NPC. And once you manage to capture him all by yourself, half of the time he won’t get into the helicopter.
One last fun bit. You’re tasked with transferring Lopotev to Russians for interrogation. But they set an ambush for you. But I had a chopper nearby, and that was the only time it worked well. Spetsnaz didn’t know what hit them.
Speaking of Spetsnaz, they have nice toys on them, like Bizon and Vintorez. A bit of a shame, really, that’s the last minute of the game, so you never get to play with them. Same with 12.7 rifles. Seen some ammo, never seen the rifle itself.
I mentioned that the game is still extremely slow even on the strongest PCs. Well, not if you reduce the draw distance. You cannot hit anything beyond few hundred meters anyway, so 2km should be fine. Also, I completely disable grass in the last mission, simply because I couldn’t see all those soldiers protecting Lopotev.
As flawed as this game was, especially the last mission, I still greatly enjoyed it, though.
