Arma II: Operation Arrowhead
With the military simulator (herein milsim for short) Arma II approaching its first birthday, the developer, Bohemia Interactive, has just released the first official expansion pack: Operation Arrowhead. Sounding eerily like a real military operation, Operation Arrowhead isn’t an expansion pack in the traditional sense – instead it’s a standalone product in its own right. In other words, you don’t need to have Arma II to play it, but if you do have both games then they’ll combine into one giant install.
The benefit of this approach is that newcomers can experience the latest version of the Arma franchise without being put off by all the baggage of the original, which has enough patches to sink a battleship. Arma II vets benefit too, as Operation Arrowhead integrates with the original game, giving you access to all the new features.
The US units finally have a decent MICV – well kinda decent.
The most obvious of these additions is the array of new units to play with and against. The single biggest group is the US Army, which makes a welcome change from the US Marine Corp simulated in Arma II. You might think that both these branches of the US military use similar equipment and tactics, but they actually operate very differently. This means players get a whole new range of small arms and vehicles to master, from M2 Bradley MICVs to Apache helicopter gunships.
The Apache helicopter makes a welcome appearance in Operation Arrowhead.
Unfortunately, the rumoured British Army units didn’t make it into Operation Arrowhead, although an ‘Expansion’ button in the main menu hints that such units may be added via DLC at a later date. There are a few UN units though, from the Czech Republic and Germany.
Operation Arrowhead also includes three new maps; a generic desert island plus two highly detailed sections of the fictional country of Takistan. No prizes for guessing what state religion and part of the world Takistan is supposed to be…
Repeat after me: ‘If you don’t know how to fly – don’t jump in an Apache and ruin the mission for everyone else’. Click to enlarge.
Still, ditching the green and flat countryside of the fictional country of Arma II’s Chernarus is very welcome. Takistan largely comprises barren, desert-like mountains, the sort of terrain that armies from the developed world increasingly seem to find themselves operating in these days. Somehow it all feels more real playing across the same sort of terrain that you can see in TV news reports from Afghanistan and Iraq every day.
Arma II isn’t an FPS, it’s a mil sim – so if you run and gun you’ll die.
Takistan isn’t unpopulated either; it’s full of civilians and guerrillas (both hostile and friendly to the US Army) plus the local government forces, all of which you can play as, or fight against. There’s a new campaign too, which can be played both offline and cooperatively with other homo sapiens. The campaign is very short and pretty buggy as per the course for a Bohemia Interactive game, but provides a wide variety of missions, including an airborne infantry assault, armoured convoy escorts and special ops infiltrations.
Given that the Arma franchise is all about cooperative multiplayer and user-generated missions the poor quality of the campaign isn’t too big of a problem – it merely serves as a gentle introduction to the new features of Operation Arrowhead.
New Features
Still, the cynic in you might be wondering why you should pay £17 for Operation Arrowhead when modding sites such as www.armedassault.info have links to more than 450 free addons that add very similar units. The answer to this is that Operation Arrowhead also includes a large number of new scripts and functions, plus a new thermal imaging engine, developed from VBS2, the military version of Arma II that various armies around the world use to train with.
While it’s arguable that casual gamers won’t notice the difference between the new engine and Call of Duty’s for example, for the hardcore milsim players that Operation Arrowhead is aimed at, it’s a huge improvement from the oversimplified green and black lowlight imagery of Arma II.
The new thermal imaging engine is a big improvement, being developed from VBS2, the military spec version of Arma II.
Another new feature allows players to adjust their sights manually to, for example, account for bullet drop, greatly increasing the realism of long range shooting. Many vehicles have now been upgraded with countermeasures too, though they are still just as vulnerable to a dedicated suicide bomber with a satchel charge.
Speaking of engines, Operation Arrowhead is still a massive challenge for any PC to play smoothly, so you should forget about running it on maximum settings. Bohemia Interactive claims to have optimised things for Arrowhead, but we didn’t find that it ran any faster than Arma II. This is a great shame, as when maxed out, Operation Arrowhead’s guerrilla-infested mountains are simply breathtaking to behold.
Arma II still has the best graphics of any PC game, but requires a supercomputer (still not available) to max out the settings and maintain a smooth frame rate.
Conclusion
Operation Arrowhead doesn’t fundamentally change the gameplay of Arma II, so it’s still a very unforgiving milsim. If you’re expecting to run and gun and live then forget it, in a milsim such as Operation Arrowhead you have to think like a soldier to survive.
What Operation Arrowhead does deliver is over 300 new units, buildings and weapons to battle with and several key improvements, such as a much more realistic thermal imagining engine.
Arma II is a mil sim so even uses standard US Army map symbols in mission briefings.
It’s a shame that Bohemia Interactive was unable to improve performance and fix many of the annoying AI issues that all too often bring a single-player mission to a shouting, keyboard bashing conclusion, but at under £20, Operation Arrowhead is a well priced way of enhancing and expanding one of the PC’s most challenging and tactical FPS games.?
