Recent reviews by Crayon dbl.edg3

ARMA 3 is simply the best tactical shooter available to the general public at this time.

9.5/10

If you want a realistic virtual platform to practise and test real-world military tactics this is the one. Plug in TrackIR or Oculus rift and you'll soon be working harder than you have in your life to move your squad 20m deeper into a heavily defended enemy town whilst your attached armed personell carriers volley in suppressive fire from the elevated position you stationed them 1 km South. And when you need those APC's to prioritize their fire onto an enemy weapons squad that's pinning you down, issue the order and they will comply.

On a less serious note, if you want a great multiplayer combined-arms experience which feels less "gamey" than the generic FPS this will also satisfy you. Want an fast-paced urban-combat experience where real skill is rewarded and spray and pray is punished? This is it.

In reality ARMA is somewhat difficult to compare to anything else available because there is nothing else with the level of detail that ARMA has when it comes to weapon models, ballistics, wounding systems (in ARMA there are memory locations for each major bone in the human body, which means you can break your lower arm bone, upper arm bone, lower leg bone, e.t.c.), AI, material penetration (walls do not stop large rounds) and the maps are pretty huge. 270km squared is bigger than a lot of real-world cities and often having a skilled pilot who can get your squad to the combat area using the terrain as cover so as to avoid lockon by enemy AA missiles will be the difference between a win and a loss. ARMA is actually not even a video game in many sense. It's more a realistic training tool which can be played as a game.

Teamplay. Nothing like it. Struggle together, or die alone. The level of danger and lethality in the ARMA series has always promoted teamwork and cooperation leading to incredibly satisfying experiences where you and friends, and sometimes total strangers, will overcome staggering odds. The combat medic drags a wounded teammate out of an open killzone. He's taking fire. The wounded man remembers to give his contact report - he saw muzzle flash from an enemy weapon 0.2 seconds before he went down, and he knows to use muzzle velocity to calculate the distance; "In the building two-hundred-and-fifty-meters to the North. First floor." His radio goes silent. He has passed out from a combination of blood loss and shock. You realise the passed out man is your teamleader so you assume command, ordering your machinegunner and grenadier to direct heavy fires into the first floor windows and smoke grenades in front of the enemy position to suppress and reduce the accuracy of the enemy shooter, keeping your medic from catching 2 lethal 7.62 rounds in the torso. The enemy shooter is determined, and smart. He's moved back in the room and is firing through a sliver of window. He knows your machinegunner doesn't know exactly where he is. The fire is still coming in. The enemy shooter hits the window rim and the round deflects way off target. His next shot is interrupted by a hail of incoming rounds from your teams machinegunner; blind-fire still kills, but after ducking for a moment the shooter is back on target. As he aims he is shook by a 40mm grenade exploding on the exterior of his building, but he knows high explosive ain't getting through a concrete wall and an enemy medic is a prize target. His weapon raises... Your medic is only 25 meters from cover now but that might as well be a mile. Dragging a 90kg man along with a combined total of 50kg of weapons and equipment is slowing his movement substantially. You know if your medic goes down, it's game over. Your team will scramble to treat the two men, become combat-ineffective and be surrounded and killed in that construction site. You know you can't go to help him because the first rule of infantry combat is use cover and don't get shot - the last thing your team needs is two men wounded instead of one. You know your machinegunner doesn't have an exact target, and with the amount of fire he's putting down he'll be lucky to hit anything. You know 40mm high explosive grenades don't penetrate concrete walls... It seems like the medic will go down soon. Surely the enemy machinegunner will deploy and deliver grazing fire across the field in a matter of seconds, cutting down everything under two meters for a long, long way, including your medic. You lean out and blindly fire to the North, feeling in the back of your mind that the mission will soon fail. Unless... Suddenly you hear a single shot from a rifle. It sounds very different to the machinegun fire that has been crackling for the past 10 seconds. A second shot, a moment later. Looking over your left shoulder you see a trail of smoke disappating around a tree about 30 meters behind your position. The smoke is from the business end of the rifle of your teams designated marksman. "Enemy marksman neutralized, North building, first floor. Enemy machinegunner neutralized, West corner of that building", he says on the radio. Enemy fire starts coming in from the North-West, but its sporadic and innacurate; the enemy squad is trying to keep you pinned whilst it reorganizes after having lost its long range and volume-fire capabilities, but those rounds are being deflected by the wind, and they're landing way off target. You calculate from the delay between impact and report that it's from over 600 meters out. Your marksman reports on the radio again; "Engaging enemy rifleman. 550 meters, North-North-West". You smile watching your medic treat your teamleader, both now in cover. Your marksman will be on the radio again soon, you feel...

Another amazing thing about ARMA 3 is its versatility; you can load up almost any scenario imaginable and jump right in - there's a reason the militaries of the world use software from the same development house to train real-world troops.

The level of support from the developers is also unparallelled. At the time of this review it's 2 years after release date and they are about to release the 2nd of 3 major updates which add massive value to the game, and they do it free.

500 000 Euro's prize money to the people who develop the best content for ARMA 3? Yes. And what great content it has been. Years of campaigns and multiplayer gamemodes and thousands of kilometers of official and community terrains.

In short it's the best realistic military simulator with more gamemodes than you could imagine and more than 1000 square kilometers of map to run, swim, drive, fly, and most of all strategize on, in, around, through, and above.

If your interest in or studies of military procedures and tactics is urging you to test your mettle, ARMA 3 is the place to do it. I even know some real-world soldiers who train with friends on the ARMA platform.

Do it.

This small-to-medium-map tactical shooter is great. Bullets are deadly, guns are balanced and feel right, and hitting and enemy is extremely satisfying due to the blood mist and the ragdoll.

The weapon customization system is set up so that the higher you score in a match the more loadout options you'll have, which works really well.

I highly recommend this game for anyone who enjoys a good tactical shooter.