It’s time for a review update, the last update was at around 700 hours in late 2018. Since that time I’ve marked close to 2300 hours in a little over 2.5 years. This review is made from a community leader perspective, a Zeus and mission maker perspective and from a serious fun but rooted in realistic expectations Milsim perspective.

Arma does what few other games manage to do, if any: Give a creator and, a gameplay enabler, the tools to tailor fit a gameplay loop for a fps community. Be that a more arcade centric, a hardcore milsim community or what I run, something that is nice and balanced between the 2.

Thanks to how moddable the Arma engine is you can build and run scenarios ranging from the US Civil war all the way to Science fiction W40K, and anything in between that has a gun present in it’s conflict resolution. The modding community makes this game what it is. ACE, CBA, RHS, CUP and all the smaller mods that enable the addition of gameplay mechanics that are not present in the base game. Although Arma 3 is perfectly playable in a vanilla setting, and having played a fair chunk of, it there is no way I can imagine my normal game sessions to not include mods.

The engine that enables these mods and the game is both Arma’s greatest strength and it’s weakness. The engine is old, like Operation Flashpoint old. This year marked 20 years that the Engine has been in the public eye over it’s various iterations going from RV1 to RV4 today. And while the engine has made leaps and bounds over these 2 decades it has reached its limit with Arma 3 and what the modding community can squeeze out of it. I am not saying that the modding community won’t be able to surprise me and come up with new and inventive ways to get around previously restricted systems. But the same kind of problems will recur often and mostly not to the mods fault.

Documentation is a problem in this game. There are a lot, and I mean a lot of third party sources that have documented things on their own. But the resulting scripts and mods can often be of wildly varying quality because of this. The learning curve to make better and less fault prone mods and scripts is substantial. If Bohemia had better documentation and even tools available to its community it would be less hit and miss. The amount of ‘Armaisms’ where physics fails dramatically or the best laid plans of a mission maker go up in flames would be greatly reduced if that were the case.

Over the years I have personally ran hundreds of missions/sessions and to this date I love every minute of the end results. The Arma 3 editor: 3DEN combined with a few mods like ZEI and 3DEN Enhanced give me a toolbox to make possible missions that even some single player experiences cannot match. You learn quickly what the game's limitations are in a multiplayer setting, and if you are willing you can adapt your wildest ideas and make them playable.

On the fly missions and mission curation is made possible by the Zeus system. Combined with the mod Zeus Enhanced I am able to, on the fly, make absolute magic happen. From quickly population (and de-populating) a city, creating a fortified position, providing fire support or taking over that one AI sniper that pins the teams on the side of a hill making them scramble to figure out where I am and what to do with me. Enough from the perspective of the gameplay enabler.

As a player the experiences I’ve had in Arma are something that I cannot fully do justice with words. You can watch a hundred videos, read a thousand testimonials of other players and still not have the full picture. For me Arma is a game where I can play with a group of people that is willing to be dedicated to team-play, good banter and get absolutely wrecked by that one BTR-80 we failed to spot behind a house, laugh about it and then figure out a way to get the son of a stalinite block of steel.

In short: Arma is flawed, but perfect. If you like Military gameplay in either Arcade or Milsim settings, Arma is the game to play. I can safely say there is a community for any style and flavor out there. Just remember that it is a game, and we are all here to have fun.

~ Good luck, and game on.