ArmA: Combat Operations review

You’ll spend a lot of time on your belly. Maneuvering takes place in fits and starts as you inch your way across the map to get the best position. By making the world as real as possible, and by making the AI ruthless, Bohemia has created a game of pure stealth, where the greatest moments are often terrifyingly tense. In one early sub-mission, we were ordered on a midnight raid into an enemy encampment to plant an explosive device near a group of tanks. The remarkable engine showed off a clear night sky, constellations twinkling, enemy campfires burning yellow and orange in the dark night.

It’s all about assimilating the data: the fires gave off enough glow to let us see the guards, and the guards themselves were constantly chattering to one another (albeit in co-ordinates: “Move to one zero one”). The darkness obviously gave cover, and approaching the camp it was necessary to lie in the long grass and watch the patrol route. But we got it wrong. On the approach we chosetorun the tank about 20 meters ahead of uswithno cover in-between. There was a campfire off to the right and a patrol suddenly passed between us and the tank. In any other game bullets would fly, but in ArmA we froze and then backed off slowly on our belly, somehow managing to keep hidden.