Reviews - Rampastring

This is Arma 2 done better. It runs fairly smoothly even on slightly older hardware, the gameplay is fun and realistic and unlike Arma 2, the game offers an acceptable amount of playable content (however still less than Bohemia's first game, Operation Flashpoint). The developers also support modding actively and as such there's a basically endless amount of mods and playable user-made missions if you start looking for them. As always, finding high-quality fan-made content is a challenge though; for every high-quality fan made mission there's a bunch of not-so-well-made missions.

If it had more playable content - especially multiplayer coop missions, I'd gladly give it a higher score.

An excellent RTS which never got the public attention it deserved.

The Forgotten is an interesting side with many cool units and ideas, but some of them don't really fit in my opinion, melee units for example.

The campaign and the cutscenes are good. Not great, but good. The campaign missions are quite repetitive (all missions are of the style "build a base and crush your enemies") and there are some things breaking the immersion, such as in some missions the Nod, GDI and Scrin seem to be allied with eachother (they target the player all the time, even if their units would be next to eachother). The missions give a nice challenge though.

GDI, Nod and Scrin haven't changed much so the multiplayer is pretty much like basic C&C3 with one new side. Nothing special.

A very good expansion pack with an enjoyable campaign, an amazing story and a lot of new content like multiplayer maps. However, is messes up the game's balance by giving GDI the Juggernaut (artillery) and the Drop Pods special weapon, and as such the score is 9. It also doesn't fix any of the smaller problems the base game had, such as the 5 unit queue limit.

It's a great military simulator, but it has some very annoying bugs (especially in multiplayer), it feels unfinished and the amount of content which comes with the game is laughable (especially the amount of missions). It almost feels like I'm buying a game engine and must make the actual game myself.

The developer, BIS, has some nice community support - although the game had a lot of bugs in the release version, I can really trust BIS and be sure that the bugs will be fixed by patches. Bohemia also has a very good habit of removing any DRM from their products a few months after release - which is another large point of respect.

If ARMA 2 would just have more multiplayer and singleplayer missions, it'd be one of my favourite games ever. I'm hoping Bohemia would look back what they did with Operation Flashpoint (campaign which had about 40 missions, plus a lot of multiplayer and singleplayer missions) and fix this emptiness when developing their next games. ARMA 2 has a large community which makes missions for it, but often these fan-made missions are varying in quality and looking for a good mission often takes about as much time as it takes you to play that mission. So it doesn't really help the situation.

ARMA 2 is at its best when it's played cooperatively in LAN multiplayer with friends. The AI really gives a challenge, and with the mission editor it's easy (but time consuming) to make exciting and varying missions.

That's about it. 8/10.