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.

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Gameplay:81

This virtual war representation is like no other game we have seen before. The feeling of battle, the multiplayer engagements, the coordination and control of subordinate troops, the very accurately modeled military vehicles, and the immensity of the battlefield forms the most veridical theater of battle to date.
New features like: the ability to swim and the multiplayer "join in progress" function solves some shortcomings OFP had, whilst the ability of changing/switching between squad members in mid battle could prove very useful, although this contradicts the steps taken by Bohemia to make the title as realistically as possible.
The ArmA community (like the OFP one) will surely provide future additional content (new missions, campaigns and factions) which will extend even more the high replayability level ArmA has.
It has some issues though that affect the gameplay a bit. The most disturbing, are the A.I. glitches encountered throughout ( route finding, target selecting, waypoints and completed objectives activation). This, together with some not to good rework done at aircrafts/helicopters controls and some poorly written dialogues in missions briefing calls for a patch to fix these bugs.

Graphics:84

There is definitely a change for the better when we bring visuals into discussion. Everything looks more crispier and sharper: vehicles, aircrafts, soldiers, battlefield, etc. The environments are a lot more alive looking due to the individualization and substantial increase in textures number of each vegetation item and building facets. The grass, which although bothers enormously when you belly lie on it aiming for enemy heads, is between the best i' ve seen.

It gives you dizziness when standing tall on the ridge of a cliff, you begin a bulleting session, sniping soldiers placed at the cliff' s foot, some few kilometers away. Anything found in real world, can be found here: mountains, seas, rivers, valleys, bridges, hills, cliffs, towns, villages.
The meteorological conditions (rain, clouds, dust, fog) and the night-day cycle cannot pass unpraised.
Dust trails from mechanized vehicles and vortexes made by helicopters landing/taking off from dusty areas, black smoke from firing cannon or tank cannon, fragmented explosions, buildings collapsing to the ground in cloud of dust makes you think about joining the army. Perhaps Bohemia should be contracted by a nation army to do just that, recruit personal.
Gamers that played OFP will immediately recognize the menus and the mission editor; menus that are very intuitive and have the military rigor to them.
It cannot be said all run very smoothly though. We encountered some visuals baddies along the unfolding of campaign. Delayed appearance or lack of textures to vehicles and humans were the most disturbing issues.

Sound:86

A few non military voice inflexions in some cases, but otherwise all falls into war terms and standards with maximum fidelity. The echo and noise of firing arms, the sound of Cobra' s engines when it lifts off, the squeaking of tanks caterpillars when tanks make a direction change, the sound of explosions (rockets, sabots, missiles) heard from inside the firing vehicle/aircraft has that perfect low tone sound to it.
Along all these, ArmA now has war music tracks associated with the campaign missions. Apparently this is also a newly introduced 'feature' by U.S. troops fighting in Iraq and Afganistan.
Something has become very obvious by now,...,it can't be much better than this.

Multiplayer:88

Supports over 100 players simultaneously under cooperative and competitive multiplayer modes. Has a newly "join in progress" feature, lots of servers and game modes to choose from: cooperative, capture the flag, flagfight, dogfight, deathmatch, team deathmatch, sector control .
Configure the theatre of battle via the mission wizzard or the game mission editor, that's your choice. The parametrization of those online fights is truly impressive, you can customize things like: the island your mission will take place, time, date, weather conditions, start position of teams, match duration, score to win, presence, skill, class of AI players and what units/weapons will be present on the battlefield.


Hardware:78

Not to pretentious regarding the hardware configuration you got at disposal. The most disturbing part in ArmA is the loading time. Besides huge loading times when missions are selected for playing; it takes way to long for players to return from the battlefield map menu (we expect a few fractions of a second for this action to be done, not a bunch of seconds). So make sure no enemy is nowhere near you when you press the 'M' button.