It's been a while since Operation Flashpoint was released to the gaming community six years ago. The game featured unprecedented realistic warfare simulation, an array of weapons and vehicles manipulated with lifelike controls; while multiplayer cooperative missions and the mission editor completed this military simulator in impressive manner.

In Operation Flashpoint you could have done just about everything your brain could think off. Control squads, aircrafts, boats, tanks, vehicles, set up military strategies to defend or overrun an establishment, use military fashioned maps to explore and use to your advantage the huge span of virtual terrain (100 square kilometers ) OFP offered. Later patches, mods and content were added to fix some bugs and expand even more the replayability of OFP. This abundant content kept the title in discussion even six years after its launch.

With ArmA, Bohemia tries to temporally satisfy the OFP aficionados, until the official successor to OFP is delivered, a title that still has the development stamp on it.
Because CodeMasters has the intellectual property over the Operation Flashpoint franchise (being the publisher of the game); the original developers, Bohemia Interactive, had to change the name of the OFP sequel. That's why ArmA denomination is now used. What is curious to see, is the announced 2008 OFP 2 which is developed and published entirely by Codemasters. So fighting war with more war is certainly good for the genres fans.

Armed Assault for sure brings lots of improvements, premieres and changes to an already near flawless OFP (patched); so it is pretty hard to tag it as revolutionary.
The storyline follows up a new plot that takes place on the fictive island of Sahrani, an island divided into a northern communist regime (titled Democratic Republic of Sahrani) and an southern democratic monarchy called Kingdom of South Sahrani.

The ambition of DRS to harness the oil rich fields of southern Sahrani initiates what will become a full scale war in latter stages of the game. The player intervenes in the role played by a stationary U.S. squad meant to help the local militia of KSS defend its lands. Being a member of this squad, you will undertake a series of key missions (sabotage, sniping, defending/attacking key strategic positions) to help KSS resist enemy attacks , until U.S. reinforcements arrive.
The war campaign follows a linear storyline and is comprised of missions which at turn are divided into key battles (two to three per mission). These missions follow a non-linear course and they are depending on the player's level of success or failure in the battles that compile that mission. So although the game has in the scenario a victorious player leaded campaign, this outcome can be reached in different ways, just like a real war.
Even playing as a cadet (veteran being the other difficulty level) will be a very challenging task. The difference between those two is given not only by the increased combat capacity of opponents (better placement/tactics and more accurate shots) but also the lack of some help features like: friendly/enemy tags while scoping/encounter targets, extended map info, unlimited saves,..etc.
The combats take place within the 400 square km (four times larger than in OFP) the new location brings. If you decide to criss-cross the island from one end to another (without accelerated time function on), it will take you approximately 100 hours (walking it).

The complete list of weapons and vehicles found in Armed Assault can be found here :

The new ArmA physics engine increases the interaction with the environments (comparing with past franchise titles), without making use of flamboyant reactions to player doings. The grass leans over when player slithers over and realistically changes direction to wind burst (nature or chopper originated), birds and insects have own A.I., the buildings now have a more refined damage and collapse case mechanics, the local concavity and water spray produced by helicopters hovering over water proves nothing was left behind by the developers. Shooting from windows or rooftops is now much more fluid and deadly effective.