Warcore Gaming

The Osprey, named for its hovering ability rather than its fish catching prowess.

Or it would be if the NPCs were a little more talkative and the polish had been applied with a tad more elbow grease. Right now the creakiest aspect of the code is the campaign scripting. Play for a few hours and you'll almost certainly encounter a faulty trigger or a baffling impasse. Example: in my last session, me and the Razors were belting along a country road in a commandeered hatchback (our usual ride, a LAV-25, having been lost in an unfortunate contretemps with a T-72 tank) when we heard over the radio that a friendly helo had gone down nearby. Could we help rescue the survivors? You bet we could! But no sooner had I turned the car round a message came through saying the mission had ended in failure. Huh?

Another time, we choppered out to a village to snatch a war-crimes suspect and on arrival found the geezer dead as a doornail, obviously executed by one of the others five factions in the tangled civil war. Logically this discovery should have meant the relevant task was ticked off our 'To Do' list, but no, it stubbornly remained unticked. Were we meant to search the corpse or report the death to the base CO? Neither action did the trick.

Campaign progress can also be frustrated by crashes - the kind that happen when the game decides it doesn't like a particular save-game (rare but annoying), and the kind that happen when your halfwit helo chauffeur decides he's going to fly his bird straight into an electricity pylon or a pine tree (more common). AI motorists and pilots are as clumsy as they were in ArmA. You have to separate men from their vehicles, and stick a weapon in their hands to see any signs of IQ improvement. The much-vaunted Micro AI manifests itself in combatants sensibly keen on cover and generous with suppressive fire. Now, if only BIS could get bots to fully exploit buildings, play possum occasionally, and perform the odd banzai charge.

Half the joy of a BIS game is rummaging through the mountain of kill kit. The best way to trial aircraft, AFVs or firearms remains the fantastically friendly, amazingly powerful editor. A few clicks and you're flying a V-22 Osprey through a wall of flak, infiltrating an enemy base as a wild boar (civilians and animals are playable), or watching the dogfight to end all dogfights. Armoury mode makes you works a little harder for your hardware fun. Success in mini-challenges gradually unlocks the full range of gadgets and units. Complete an obstacle course, eliminate an enemy patrol, shoot a set number of clay pigeons... it's OpFlash the way PopCap would do it. A few of the tasks are criminally silly (I'm thinking specifically of the one where you play a poacher-avoiding rooster) but in a game as gritty and gruelling as ArmA II a bit of levity doesn't hurt.

And make no mistake, ArmA II has grit and gruel by the lorry-load. Where other shooty games DHL targets to your door, this one makes you search high and low for them (most of the campaign is spent travelling hopefully rather than arriving). Where other FPSs keep your crosshairs rock-steady and your view unobstructed, here bad posture, tiredness, fear and foliage transform gunnery from a science into a dark art. It's the difference between playing COD4 on your desktop rig at home, and playing it on a laptop while running through a wet forest being chased by Alsatians. Initially exasperating, massively satisfying once you get the hang of it.