PMC ArmA 2 Operation Arrowhead review

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Snake Man
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PMC ArmA 2 Operation Arrowhead review

Post by Snake Man » 2010-06-28 07:47:19

This is PMC review of ArmA 2 Operation Arrowhead, standalone expansion for ArmA 2.

I got the German release which is v1.51.7183 and its fully English language.


Install

Goes smoothly to ArmA 2 directory, it offers it first but I heard that it can be also installed to a different directory.

As my dir is arma2\ it makes makes the following subdirs; Common and Expansion. Then it creates arma2OA.exe file which is used to run the game.


Running the game

I used exactly the same parameter line to run arma2OA.exe as I did my arma2.exe all worked out of the box. You can (need!) to use -profiles= dir setting so Users dir is found on proper location, -mods dir work (more on this later) and so on.


Town generator

Works as advertised, makes very believable towns instantly. This is very important new feature which gives so much more game play value. Its kind of amazing to think nobody has done such earlier (well Kronzky did, but he did not release it).

How it works is you place a module gamelogic into a empty terrain and it creates a town there. I didn't go deep enough to check how the town sizes are done, but the default simple gamelogic did very nice small to average sized town.

There are buildings, then all kinds of trash piles, old cars, piles of tree logs (spelling) and that sort of signs of human life.

The ambient civilian manager also seems to work nicely with the generated town.


FLIR / thermal imaging

Excellent piece of technology. Very nice to use and pick out infantry and running/warm vehicles and objects with it.

The FLIR is white hot and black hot, you can change between these two.

Its little bit turkey shoot as you see black and white image and just try to shoot all the white stuff there heh.

For infantry weapons there is versions which has the thermal thing scope added, for example one of the single missions featured M107 Barrett sniper rifle with this scope.


UAV / Unmanned Little Bird (ULB)

I actually tried only briefly the UAV but been doing few missions with the ULB. Very nice way to use FLIR and spot enemies while the Apache is hovering kilometers away ready to launch hellfire missiles.

The targeting system has usual normal view, night vision, then white hot and black hot FLIR/thermal thing. You have laser marker to designate targets.

Maybe I didn't find it, but there is no "lock" on the targeting systems, so for moving targets you must constantly keep the target sights on them. The hellfire launch is only few seconds when you fire to the impact. By any means this isn't a bad thing, just mentioned as I had impression it has some sort of lock to target feature.

In mission editor you place AH64, ULB and ULB gamelogic (or was it just UAV heh cant remember), synchronize (F5) them together and its ready to be used.


Sight adjustment / Zeroing

This is very cool feature to a game such as ArmA 2 which has long ranges. Earlier since OFP times you had to elevate your sniper rifle to ridiculous amounts to hit targets 1000m away, but no more. Now you can just use keys to bring in the zeroing up and down usually hundred meters (with tanks its more than that).

It is so enjoyable to zero your sniper rifle to 600m and just aim target dead center and score a kill. Just excellent feature.


Expansions

There is "Expansions" button in the main menu, this appears to scan all directories in the game root dir and which has Addons subdir, it flags as addons/mods. I placed VTE mod dir as "vte" dir into my "d:\arma2\" directory and it was then selectable in the expansions menu.

There is ArmA2OAProfile file in your users dir, this is the file where all user options/settings are saved. In this file there is entry:

Code: Select all

class ModLauncherList
{
};
So I assume the mod list which you have activated is then written here, just a guess as I didn't test it.

I'm greatly disappointed about this :(

Why? Well in OFP I have 44, ArmA 109 and ArmA 2 so far 27 addon/mod dirs. Do I plan on adding that amount of sub directories in game root dir? No, I do not.

My addons/mods are located in d:\arma2\x\ directory, therefore they are not interfering the otherwise neat directory list of ArmA 2. Some people actually have their addon/mod dirs located even on other HDD partitions, I was thinking of this too, to create some unified mod dir like d:\mods\ofp\ and d:\mods\arma\ ... you get the idea. However I think the mod parameter line would be bit long then, I use now the 'x' because its so short and neat. So imagine having a startup line of:

Code: Select all

arma2oa.exe -mod=\mods\arma2\cba;\mods\arma2\vte;\mods\arma2\pmc -showScriptErrors -nosplash -world=empty -profiles=d:\ArmA2
etc, uuh long piece of strings. Oh well, it doesn't really matter, but still, why not settle for mere 'x' as its so nice.

I feel that this issue is the same as the Users dir located in the lame c:\documents and settings\ directory in ArmA, after which it was patched to the -profiles parameter.


Boot Camp tutorials

These are very nice tutorial missions where newbies are walked through them holding their hand. If anyone takes the time to go through them, they should have no problems of playing ArmA 2 even if they never played it before.


Single Missions

Very nice missions, there is missions for infantry, tanks, helos and so on. The missions aren't that long, quite easy actually. No bugs in the missions, except on the night specops one after a loading savegame, just a usual script error on top of the screen, didn't bother me that much and didn't effect game play.


Campaign

Campaign was bit hyped in the community, but that's not BIS fault at all, so in a way I was expecting something "awesome", but it was very good and overall nice campaign, nothing special though to hype about. I didn't find any bugs in the campaign which is very nice in my opinion.

Has the usual voice acting, various missions as infantry, specops, helo pilot, tank commander and also high command in use so on.

Very enjoyable campaign, also not too long, in fact I felt it was maybe little bit short.


Bugs

I didn't find many. On missions only the specops night mission had the BIS HALO script giving error message after savegame, but other than that I found OA to be really polished release. I'm sure there will be some issues when I continue to play, but overall first impression after playing "one day" is very good. This is totally enjoyable at the moment for me, no issues or bugs that cause game play problems.


Performance

I'm oldschool guy for creating desert terrains so I know their performance gain against densely populated usual BIS terrains, so I was expecting nice performance.

It has very nice performance but I also noticed little surprising thing as many of the bushes are quite low poly, where previously BIS has used polygons to model bush roots, now they were just planes with alpha channel textures. There is nothing wrong with this method, but that rings bells in my ear telling that BIS seriously wanted to have high performance for OA, maybe even "at any cost" so to speak. Again, nothing wrong with low poly vegetation, just bit surprising, that's all.

The big city terrain I noticed some slowdowns, but nothing that would have caused problems. That city actually ain't that big, sure it might be the biggest city BIS has made for us so far, but as for historically released addons, it doesn't even come close of being the largest city.

I really cannot tell if its some engine improvement or just the fact that the terrain is completely different what Charnarus is. I'm assuming BIS has optimized the engine too but to what extend, maybe we should test it on Chernarus to find out.


Overall

ArmA 2 Operation Arrowhead is as great as I was hoping it to be and then some. It truly is, I'm really happy with it and can wholeheartedly recommend it for everyone.

This is what Resistance was for OFP, everyone should and needs to have it.
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T_Rex
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Re: PMC ArmA 2 Operation Arrowhead review

Post by T_Rex » 2010-06-28 13:38:21

Thanks, SnakeMan!

Your opinions carry alot of weight with me, and I'm sure many others!
Sic Semper tyrannosauro.

DMarkwick
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Re: PMC ArmA 2 Operation Arrowhead review

Post by DMarkwick » 2010-06-29 12:35:46

A nice review, thanks for providing it. :)

I will be indulging myself with OA for sure. Seems to be the least I can do for BIS providing so much entertainment.

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