A rapid cacophony of impacts broke the monotony of driving, accompanied by the chatter and crack of automatic fire hitting the vehicle. The person next to me that I had been talking to was already slumped over and covered in blood by the time I realised we were in the middle of an ambush.
I jumped out of the vehicle, as it's wheels had been taken out by a 40MM grenade, and, because I had been shot in the leg, crawled my way into a ditch at the side of the road, where I passed out and died.

I think, after all this time, I can finally review this game.

One of the biggest things I noticed coming into this game is the learning curve, which is rather extreme. You will intially be very confused by things and some, the AI and the ballistics in particular, are very complex and not well explained in-game.

Once you overcome that, the game opens up and it's absurd freedom starts tp show- you can do ANYTHING in this game, despite it being presented as a military tactical game.

Multiplayer-

Modes and missions range from the Life and RPG simulation of everyday normality, people working jobs, driving around and having a police force, to the Survival and post-apocalyse gamemodes revolving around the pursuit of food and water, weapons and transport to stay alive.

You have the ever-popular PvP gamemodes such as King Of The Hill and EUTW, which bring a Battlefield style gameplay mode into Arma, and you have the original Battlegrounds, which was so popular it is now available as a standalone game.

Another side of the game is that of the clans and groups who take the base Arma's focus on the military and expand it, making the already impressive realism to ever greater levels, with things like new weapons, uniforms and vehicles covering every nation in the world, to advanced medical modes that take into account blood loss, surgeons and battlefield trauma and medical care to fantastic and impressive details.

Groups like these are one of the biggest attractions of the game, and range from small groups to friends to massive clans with over 300 active members- Arma can support over 160+ players in a single multiplayer game, in addition to hundreds of AI soldiers, so the scale of some of these groups in without comparison to anything else except EVE.

Arma has such a wide variety and depth to all it's systems, from how the ballistics and each individual round is modeled in the game, and affected by velocity, drop, zeroing, penetration against various materials from wood, brick, steel and body armor, to rounds being able to bounce and deflect due to high-angle ricochets on hard surfaces like concrete or vehicles.

That's just a single example, and the game covers everything from underwater combat and submarines, land battles with infantry and tanks with modular damage to systems and parts, making it possible to, for example, knock out a tanks tracks and turret without destroying it, leaving it totally helpless, all the way to next-generation jet fighters and advanced radar detection, thermal and IR technology.

You can go from using a submarine and respirators for a stealthy night insertion on a Greek coastline in 2035, to commanding a tank crew in a pitched battle in the Iraqi desert during the Gulf War, to evacuating wounded soldiers from thick Vietnamese jungles in 1970, before using an American aircraft carrier to stage for a dogfight above Russia in the modern day, all in the course of a few hours.

This is due to the huge modding and creation community for the game, who add a massive range of things to the game, from new vehicles, sounds, maps, campaigns and new missions, systems and anything you can possibly think of- Someone has either made it or is working on it- from ALIEN and Star Wars, RPG and Police cars, to every weapon and piece of equipment used by the British, American, French, German and Russian armies over the past decade.

On to the Singleplayer aspects of the game-

I put over 350 hours into the singleplayer content alone, and never even touched the multiplayer aspects until after that.
Despite it's reputation for it's MP based community singleplayer can still give people plenty of intresting missions, and Steam Workshop support for mods and missions is fantastic.

The base Arma 3 campaign is set in 2035, and revolves around NATO forces on the islands of Altis and Stratis (based on real islands off the coast of Greece) and their fighting with the native AAF armed forces and the more advanced CSAT, based on an Iran/ ME alliance.

The campaign does not hold your hand, and you are thrown into a situation where you are NOT the winners, being constantly on the back-foot and fighting with lesser equipment and as guerillas and insurgents fighting against a military with superior armaments to you, which is a nice change from the normal state of affairs in games, where you play the exact opposite.

The campaign is rather long and has both free-roaming missions and storyline missions to progress throughout it. I would estimate the base campaign to be about 20-35 hours long depending on difficulty, your style of play and if you do the optional free-roaming mission.

The AI are able to supress you, pin, flank and use a decent level of tactics, so it's often best to take some time to plan your mission in advance- What cover is in the area? What is the sightlines and visibility and is a stealth approach possible? Where are the enemy patrol routes and is there any chance of enemy reinforcements? What type of enemy soldiers and equipment do you suspect they have- nightvision, machineguns, marksmen, support assets like vehicles or static weapons can affect your approach to your objective.
The sandbox nature of the game means you can often go around or even totally avoid some obstacles or forces you might come across.

The Apex Expansion also adds a small COOP campaign, which has some great presentation and polish, based on Tanoa, which is a fictional island off the coast of Fiji, and is a utterly STUNNING looking map, well worth the price of the Expansion.

Apex takes place on the Tanoan islands, off the coast of Fiji and Australia, and follows a small, well equipped British special forces group, CTRG, and their fighting against the Syndikate drug Cartel in the jungles. As special forces you are often deployed at night, and have access to advanced equipment like thermals and night vision, putting you at a technological advantage over the Cartel, but the Cartel have greater numbers so a stand-up battle is often a fatal problem- it's often possible to avoid patrols and soldiers. Apex also adds a wide range of weapons including the AK-47M, AK-12, AKS-74U, HK-416 and HK-417, M249 SAW, MP5K PDW.

Performance and lifetime-

One of the biggest problems people have with the game is performance. Because of huge complexity of the game, particularly in Multiplayer, the performance of the server and the mission is paramount- MOST of the highly popular and heavily scripted gamemodes will not get 60 FPS, regardless of settings, but with a good server and mission you can achieve 60+ FPS. The game is biased towards CPU clock speed, rather than the GPU like most other games, so a higher clock CPU sees much better performance than a GPU upgrade.

The game is constantly getting large updates even years after release, and the DLC's always come with free platform updates, adding new features like bipods, sound overhauls, new weapon and clothing features like thermal concealment, advanced helicopter flight models for more simulator-like flying, and many others it would take too long to list.

To end-

Arma is, put simply, the most widely varied and impressive game I have ever played, and the absurd number of hours I have in the game ( Over 3500 at the time of writing) is a testiment to it's great community, authentic gameplay and varied experiences. I'm going to be playing the game for years to come, and Arma was an eye-opening intoduction to PC gaming for me.

This is for all the hate that this release has gotten: Played a solid 4-5 hours today and got what I expected when I paid the $29.99 USD for an ALPHA RELEASE that Rocket himself said was going to have its share of bugs and should NOT be bought if your expecting it to be perfect, for christ sakes it says it on the store page! The game is exactly what I expected, there are new fun mechanics for drinking and eating, the Zed and Item spawning is differnt: Everything gets spawned in at server start ( Something all the haters who played 30 mins and quit to go post crap on the reviews would have know if they watched maybe a single dev video leading to this moment) so yes there will be buildings that have no loot and towns that seem devoid of zeds becuase they have been cleaved thru by the horde of players wanting to play. As far as all night servers, totally bunk: From what I see the servers are bound to the Realtime of there location i.e. a server hosted in IL in the states would be off CST so if you join said server at 9pm central time guess what? ITS FLIPPING DARK, shocker I know. Other servers I joined DID have daytime but a majority were hitting dusk meaning there local time was prolly hitting the early evening as well. Movement IMO is better looking, I did swim a bit too for S**ts and giggles and even that seemed a little faster than the mod and deffinetly nicer looking. Inventory system is a little wonky at first but very easy to get used to, the hot bar at the bottem is great for quick selecting important items and even remembers the last item that was placed (I hotkey'd a soda and after drinking it the outline stayed put and the next time I grabbed THAT kind of soda it was placed in that slot) seemingly random spawn in : alot of us seemed to spawn in at the coast which wasnt surprising, but a few people spawned inland as well including my buddy who spawned at Stary Sobor (Practically the middle of the map). Lastly the servers are linked via a hive, meaning that if you didnt like the connection you had or the population, or simply thought there wasnt enough loot spawning: Hop to another server and be at the exact point with the same gear as when you logged off on the other server.

Thats just a few of the things I experienced in one night on a few differnt servers, now for the bad: The KOS mentality is deffinetly a problem and seems to only make the task of Alpha testing that much harder, not that anything can be done about the rampant PvP or should be done but it pays to know that the process of helping the staff debug this game in Alpha stage only gets harder when someone fresh off the coast with nothing but the cool fancy axe he found and the gear he spawned in with see's you and buries said axe in your head while you try to talk with him or loot gear unknowingly, and of course is followed by "You mad bro" or my personal favorite "What a dumbass!" (Followed by his mom telling him not to cuss, LOL) that said, griefers abound so watch your six, alot of folks I ran into were genuinly nice and trying to just figure out the game and not♥♥♥♥♥♥rush the nearest breathing human with the kitchen knife they JUST looted (I fear for the survival of humanity in a real zombie apocolypse). A big one here and has been address'd already in testing is the fact that when you pass out from thirst or hunger or a good hit from a weapon you dont wake up, this is true to a point, IF your in a group or IF a friendly passerby see's you he/she can hit you with an EpiPen if they have one to wake you up but as to be expected that doesnt happen very often so basically you might as well press Esc and Respawn (Effectivly a built in suicide button, kills character and spawns you again) Infuriating to say the least but deffinetly on the top priority fix list. To finish the bad up I really dont like the lack of a Thirst/Hunger/Blood/Temp UI. The text warnings are OK, but spam too much and seem to give you very little in the way of knowing EXACTLY how bad off you are, something that only seems to compound the Unconcious-ness issue.

Again ill reiterate that this game is NOT a finished product, dont believe me? why not read this message thats right on the store page:

“DayZ Early Access is your chance to experience DayZ as it evolves throughout its development process. Be aware that our Early Access offer is a representation of our core pillars, and the framework we have created around them. It is a work in progress and therefore contains a variety of bugs. WE STRONGLY ADVISE YOU NOT TO BUY AND PLAY THIS GAME AT THIS STAGE UNLESS YOU CLEARLY UNDERSTAND WHAT EARLY ACCESS MEANS and are interested in participating in the ongoing development cycle.”

Couldnt be more clearer, but at the same time this is also the lowest you will see this game priced for a VERY long time. If you love DayZ, want to be part of the process to make it better, can overlook the problems it has currently, and maybe JUST MAYBE take some stuff with a grain of salt like a mature adult than I hope to see you in Chernarus sir/ma'am.

EDIT: Some changes to take into consideration:
-Saline Bags can be used as a form of Epi-Pen for unconcious-ness
-New Color coded Text in the TAB menu for Thirst/Hunger

Also Ive noticed a few things that you should be aware of, as of yet I have NOT been infected in game at all. Friends have told me the same and the ones that have been infected all say its from zeds. This may be due to them not fully fleshing out or introducing infection to the other regular sources so that being said get your fill of stagnant ponds and water pumps while you can. This also means Water purification tablets are unnessesary, if someone finds out otherwise let me know! Also Cooking has not been implemented yet so dont waste ammo on the bunnies as fun as it might be to murder the little ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥s (Bunnies as of yet dont have there own SFX so instead they make Zed noises, annoying and scary when you here a zed and theres not one around), this also means you can stop picking up Cooking pans and taking up Inventory space. There is also a few bugs that my buddies have let me in on that involve dup'ing Saline on unconcious players that are glitched out somehow, and server lag can sometimes result in Dup'ing items from one backpack to another (Seen this happen alot with ammo clips, specifically the FNX42 pistol) Also alot of people I know keep getting♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥when they see there hatchet/Gun carried♥♥♥♥♥♥eye'd resulting in missed shots or swings. Ive made a bug report for it and my fix has been to either hit Spacebar to re-raise it to rdy position or de-equip it and re-equip it via the hotkey bar.

I think I may need a discussion channel or something lol
Good Hunting Survivor!


This review is not all about melee "angrymonkey". But since you brought it up, yes melee currently is pretty lame, hit detection is off with zeds and players alike until you just get used to using the damn weapons as they are set at the moment. I have no problem dancing circles around zeds swinging my axe and killing them without taking DMG. What you fail to realize is at the moment zeds cant hit a moving target very well so staying mobile and swinging your axe/pipe/wrench etc... will yield results. Also I should note that only the 2 Axe weapons will outright kill a zed in 1-2 swings, players may take around 1-4 depending on your aim. Also, when has melee combat in DayZ been anything BUT difficult? taking into consideration as well that most PvP encounters with melee or otherwise results in spamming of the attack button (Almost every axe wielding maniac has just run up and swung madly, and every gun toting ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ has unloaded an entire clip while running around), nobody seems to care about Accuracy but more about how much chaos they can create for there target, and how many shots/swings they can make before one lucky hit happens and call it "Skill".