PC Gamer - March 2012

TOP 100 GAMES
8
Arma 2:
Operation
Arrowhead

Release: 2010

Evan: What’s more PC than an open-world sandbox that honors your ideas? Arma loves freedom as much as Minecraft, demands more synchronized teamwork than classic Rainbow Six, and—with a native mission editor—is more moddable than Half-Life.

No other game has equipped me with a set of strange,
semi-practical skills. I can recite the NATO phonetic
alphabet. I can read topographical maps. I have a ne w
appreciation for compasses. I can tell you what a “staggered column”
troop formation is. I can estimate ranges. I can (finally) float seamlessly
into conversations about the trade-off in ammo capacity versus stopping
power between 5.56mm and 7.62mm rounds with my crazy, gun-loving
Michigan relatives.

Half of Arma is commuting to the action—hiking, flying, floating, or driving at-scale, often for kilometers—but the sparks of genuine tension and emergent war waiting at the end are always worth it. Here are a fe w: When you’re face-in-the-grass and a dragonfly whirrs through your optics. Shooting out the tail rotor on a helicopter with an MG. Hijacking anything. Phoning in a ground target to your friend overhead in an F- 35, laser-targeting it, and holding your breath as the bomb falls so you can hear the detonation. That feeling of having something deeply important (e.g. “Guys, guys, guys—they have anti-air.”) to report to your teammates over radio. Rocket-strafing a village. Landing a first-shot headshot at 400m because you dialed-in your sights correctly. Hell, just map-read-ing—having an eye for safe LZs makes you an asset to the team.

All that stuff adds up to Arma being a profound war story generator. During one co-op mission our Blackhawk pilot had to fly us no higher than 30m off the surface to avoid radar detection. Over several clicks of variegated desert. We sat silent in the belly of the helo, clearing comms so our ace could concentrate. He got us in alive. And then, for a full hour, he waited on the ground, on-call, while 30 of us scrambled over Takistani hills like rats, raiding a radar base. He wasn’t bored; he delighted in his role, and in the mutual military story we were writing with our decisions. He kept the engine warm for us. He was our getaway driver.

Arma’s imperfections exist only because the developers attempted something ludicrously ambitious (64-player, high-fidelity warplay with realistic systems, hundreds of weapons and vehicles in a hundred-mile-wide warscape). But the emergent moments waiting to be mined from it are so personal and potent that they stick in your glands for weeks.