

It's absurd that my squad's medic won't patch me up when I'm bleeding right next to him unless I order him to. This is the sort of human behavior I'd love to see more of, stuff like blind-firing, limping, throwing smoke grenades for cover, claiming abandoned vehicles, or looting bodies for supplies-anything that would lessen the predictability.įriendly AI is even worse, unfortunately, because they're typically your responsibility. Holographic, high-magnification, thermal, and other types of optics can be attached to almost every rifle along with other rail items like grenade launchers and flashlights.Ī few sparks of intelligence did impress me-after we killed the rest of his squadmates, I watched a rifleman flee for the first time in Arma, setting up a tense shot where I had a narrow few seconds to snipe him in the back before he disappeared behind trees. Their greatest flaw is that they lack personality, which mostly resigns them to being targets rather than soldiers.ģD weapon optics contribute a lot to Arma 3's infantry combat. Arma 3's enemies share plenty of their ancestors' DNA, which means that they oscillate between being eagle-eyed snipers at one moment and static, dumb, 3D silhouettes evocative of a light gun arcade game another. On the opposite end of your gun, though, AI remains a shortcoming. Coupled with the general smoothing of movement and the near elimination of Arma 2's uninterruptible, sluggish animations, running and gunning should finally feel comfortable to average FPS players. You feel articulate-making small body adjustments while behind cover initially feels like finger gymnastics, but the system makes more types of cover viable and more types of weapons viable in that cover.

Holding the Ctrl key as a modifier while tapping W or S cycles between nine vertical stances, and you can also take a horizontal step in addition to using Q or E to lean. On the ground, a new stance adjustments system is the best thing that's ever happened to infantry combat in Arma.
COMBAT ARMS VIDEO GAME AGE RATING FREE
Assuming you have an internet connection, this well of content compensates for the absence of an official campaign at launch, which will integrate in three free monthly installments beginning in October. Central to this fun is how malleable Arma continues to be for its community, which before launch day had published almost 1,500 missions to Steam Workshop. The feeling of ownership that arises over these moments between you and your squadmates sticks in your brain. The sequence of events, the chatter, the wounds and kills we rack up, all developed because we happened to run over a mine and our tires got shot up.Īrma's capacity for stimulating camaraderie, atmosphere, and problem-solving, in other words, is fully intact. At one point we position two machinegunners with nightvision scopes at the lip of a valley to provide cover as we drive the HEMTT down an exposed valley, then taxi them back to us on the ATV. When we're free of immediate danger, we send someone back to base to retrieve an ATV so that we have a forward scouting element. But everyone works together to keep our war bus on track-my teammates give turn instructions, read the map, and scan the road for more mines. For the rest of the mission I have to drive lopsided, constantly counter-steering just to keep the truck on the gravel road. The wheels don't deflate enough to go flat, but the suspension slumps to the left. Green tracers track the truck, eventually pricking some of my tires. We clump into the fragile HEMTT, burning diesel to get off the exposed ridge. Everyone's okay, but the Panther is immobilized.ĭumping the APC is the only option. As we get out to survey the damage, rockets streak across the valley. Minutes after leaving base, our tanky bodyguard eats a land mine, ruining its left track. To protect this elephantine truck we had a IFV-6c Panther, an APC with a mounted grenade launcher and 12.7mm MG. On Operation Fault Line with a gang of Steam pals, I had to drive a clumsy, eight-wheeled transport called a HEMTT across the map. With voice-connected friends and a good user-created mission, Arma 3 is an unparalleled war story generator. A tank percusses the ground after firing.
