ArmA II (PC)

Unmade in Manhattan: How ArmA II falls apart just as it's starting to get good
7/13/2009 3:47 PM | 6 Comments | Page 1 of 4

"Welcome to Manhattan, Marines," Colonel Shaftoe says to us.

Well, to me. I'm the only one standing here. I told the other Marines to wait in the car.

Forward Operating Base Manhattan consists of concrete blocks arranged into barricades, indestructible tents, desultory vehicles, impenetrable lines of barbed wire, stacks of crates, and various generator-powered trailers, one of which is supposed to let me control an unmanned aerial vehicle (more on that later). The other Marines are waiting in the car parked outside. I didn't let them come in with me because they have a tendency to get stuck on objects. It's easy enough to jump into their skins to simply walk them out of their stuck positions. But I might not notice they're stuck until I'm halfway to some distant objective, trundling along in a vehicle or plunging through some woods with the squad fanned out in a "V" behind me. At which point I hear and see:

3: "WHAT IS YOUR LOCATION?"

What? I'm right here in the Humvee, you dolt. Why on earth are you...? Oh, wait, Number Three is not in the car, is he? Has anyone seen Number Three?

Numbers Two and Four are mum. As usual. The car is quiet. The weird thing about road trips in ArmA II is that no one talks. These guys are terrible travel companions. And there's no radio. Craning my virtual neck, I see the overlay for Number Three on the HUD. He's 1,800 meters behind us. Numbers Two and Four look blankly ahead with no opinion. Okay, guys, let's go back and pick up Number Three, who's probably jammed between a pair of concrete blocks.

That's how it went last time. So this time, everyone waits in the car while I go into Forward Operating Base Manhattan alone. I'm here to get the briefing from Colonel Shaftoe, who addresses me in the plural. Maybe he thinks I'm good enough to be referenced as multiple Marines. Maybe he's drunk and seeing double. I should cut him a break. This is war, and a videogame, to boot. He can't possibly have known that I wasn't going to bring the boys to the briefing. Like me, he doesn't expect all the glitches the get in the way of this game functioning like it's supposed to.

And that's pretty much ArmA II in a nutshell: a tremendously exciting, ambitious game that you cannot possibly expect to be so bad for all the terrible bugs and glitches and unfinished bits and systems that just simply don't work. But it is that bad, and it will make sure you know it. You cannot avoid discovering what a mess it is. A lovely mess I hope will one day get fixed, but mostly just a mess at this point. I find it interesting that my commanding officer is named Shaftoe, which sounds like the verb for screwing someone over and then kicking him. Very clever name, that. Very appropriate.

ArmA II, which is not a very clever name and does not -- the developer insists -- technically stand for "Armed Assault II," is the sequel to ArmA: Armed Assault, itself a sequel to Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis. It's the latest in a long line of ambitious, dysfunctional military sims from Bohemia Interactive. They are harshly realistic and enormously complex, and now they're open-ended to a fault.