ArmA: Combat Operations review

There’s a school of thought among some Flashpoint fans that Bohemia’s real reason for Armed Assault is to deliver the updated engine to the players. Certainly Flashpoint is one of the most modded games ever, and ArmA’s editor and scripts enable a degree of quality way beyond that found in the bundled single-player missions. For example, there’s a script in there that tells AI units to drag injured people out of the line of fire, and it never pops up in the prepackaged tasks.

If it’s the case that we should be reviewing the tools rather than the game then there’s definitely a whole lot more to be said. At their most basic you’re able to plunk down a few soldiers, tanks and helicopters with a few guiding waypoints and tell them to kill one another, and the resulting firefight will be short and spectacular. Spend some time with it, work out the coding and triggers, and you’ll be setting up the sort of mass parachute drops and land battles that we’ve not seen since WWII.