armory forger despite not being a proper
sequel manages to be more of a sequel
than any armor game to date this is
helped by how it's returned back to
where it all began back to operation
flashpoint's era of weapons and conflict
and back to the island of everone and
i've enjoyed revisiting all the places
that we still play at lans but now no
longer constrained by all the graphical
limitations of that ancient engine this
is what 20 years of hardware
advancements looks like and more
surprisingly for me it's the first arma
game that i feel has significantly
advanced the gameplay operation
flashpoint armor armor 2 and arma 3 may
all pretend to be different games but
they're virtually identical beneath the
surface their worlds feel equally
slippery the building's equally empty
and even their vehicles handle similarly
and are bugged in the same ways even the
hud has made very little effort to
change over these past 20 years ferry
forger finally changes all of this
i haven't spent long in this game yet
but it's clear to me that this is the
first time since the series began where
they've seriously gone back to the
drawing board and have reworked
everything whilst building a suitable
engine to accommodate it all the loading
times are minuscule both to boot the
game up and to load a match itself and
that feels great and the engine handles
the jumps and scale brilliantly easily
zooming straight out into the sky and
then back onto a pebble on the beach
again even though you will spend most of
your time in this game slogging about at
a sleep inducing rate it's still nice to
know that the engine is equally well
equipped to cater for the aircraft
pilots you now have proper animations
for boarding vehicles and the general
movement gun play and jump button now
makes you feel a lot more connected with
the world than the older games did it's
still armor but it is finally starting
to borrow the best bits from other game
series as well much like the far cry and
crisis series operation flashpoint and
armor started out as being the same
thing i still refer to it as operation
flashpoint because that's the one that i
fell in love with but the team behind
the original operation flashpoint lost
the rights to the name and went on to
make the armor series instead as
spiritual sequels they later rebranded
the original operation flashpoint to be
armor cold war assault which further
confused things meanwhile codemasters
retained the rights to the operation
flashpoint name and with it produced two
sequels of their own the first one was
dragon rising and the second was the
abysmal red river which i believe could
only have been made the way it was
despite the original developers and to
kill the operation flashpoint name
outright i thought it was terrible back
then but i just looked up a video of the
first mission again and i think it
somehow got even worse compared with
that one dragon rising is actually
rather good i mean it isn't operation
flashpoint but it had a good stab at
being something halfway between it and
more mainstream shooter games it's just
a shame the enemies could see through
the long grass everywhere which made it
literally impossible its world was
probably even larger than armas was and
it's such a shame the editing tools were
rubbish and that the single player
campaign was limited to just a few spots
because i've really wanted to explore
that world i feel like its development
time was cut short and they were never
able to make it the game it could have
been but despite all that i could still
see that the game was good at the bits
that armour wasn't the engine was great
at rendering massive worlds and the
frame rate was always high and super
responsive and the game did vehicles and
the hud in a far better way than armor
ever did i always wish that they could
have combined the best of both series
and it looks like with rue forger
they've finally done that vehicles now
feel like real physical heavy things
with wheels instead of whatever they
were meant to be in the earlier games
but that doesn't mean they're easier to
control now the truck is significantly
harder but it feels fairer and it's more
fun than ever to launch your jeep off
the side of a mountain it used to be
common for me to just explore a new open
world game when it first came out to
discover the ways in which it pushed the
envelope and all that but i haven't
found myself doing that too much
recently however i am doing that with
reforger there's something about the way
this world is constructed that makes
each track each building and each forest
inviting i don't know what i'll find but
i'll still be left pleasantly surprised
and i suppose it's helped by the fact
that this game does everything properly
it isn't like other series which may
tease at freedom but will still try to
pull you back into the battlefield if
you try to escape or maybe they'll
deliberately block off accessing
buildings because they're only set
dressings armor of reforge doesn't do
this though because everything on the
island of everyone is real the sun does
move across the sky the clocks do move
around the weather does change and i
could be unfairly and instantly murdered
by a distant hidden sniper at any second
and i greatly appreciate all that
i found myself getting flashbacks to
arma 1. the colours and overblown hdr in
this game is very similar as is the draw
distance improvement it brings over the
previous entries there's just something
about this game that makes me want to go
prone in a bunch of nettles and to
admire the subsurface scattering yet
graphically it's not like even this one
is cutting edge it doesn't have ray
traced reflections or contact hardened
shadows but the game knows what's
important and it does that stuff right
the whole place just feels sufficiently
and uniformly detailed no matter how
close you get to an object gravel gets
parallax mapping to make it look 3d
there are slippery looking rocks and
beaches layers of dead leaves coating
the forest it even does that thing where
clouds actually cast shadows this means
that even on a mostly sunny day you'll
still be occasionally plunged into
darkness as a cloud rolls overhead it's
something i don't see enough of in these
types of games and it makes a big
difference to how real the world feels
the shadows on the ground do seem to
line up with the clouds in the sky
although speeding things up highlights
the limitations of how accurately this
is depicted as the cloud-cast shadows
begin to stutter and shift abruptly and
there's an awkward gap between the
close-up shadows and the more distant
ones so shadows are an area where it's
two steps forward and one step back for
the armor franchise i've heard good
things about the lighting at night i
know that the armor series has always
taken pride in supporting dozens of
different light sources and all that but
i don't know if i've ever actually been
impressed with it in practice and indeed
i struggled to set up a scenario that
showcased it well for this video muzzle
flashes proved to be too dim a light
source and even burnt out vehicles only
produce a feeble amount of light i like
that they featured lightning strikes
although these don't seem to cast light
either and it quickly became apparent
just how limited the vehicles in this
game are the list of them looks
impressive until you realize it's only
really like four or five different
vehicles each bulked out in multiple
paint styles there's only one type of
tank in this game and no aircraft to
speak of what is this armor this isn't
like you and no boats either so i can't
even race them down mountains like i
used to in the good old days there needs
to be a lot more stuff and i suspect
almond reforger will be the platform the
developers use to design all these
things with and then we as the players
get to be the guinea pigs that help bug
test them
and please can we have breakable trees
and pylons back it looks great when you
destroy a fence or smash up those
roadside bollards yet for some reason
tanks can be stopped by a twig like this
even operation flashpoint did better
than this provided you didn't venture
into its adamantium forests if
destructible foliage isn't added to
reforger then this game will be dead to
me so while some critical features are
still missing this title already has one
massive advantage over previous ones
this time around i finally feel like i
know what the developers wanted from
this series all this time it's felt like
they've just built big generic military
sandboxes and have left it to the
players to try and make good use of it
but not so this time arma 3 had a very
long lifespan but over that time the
developers evolved the title and
experimented with lots of new features
and it feels like reforger is the
product of these having taken the best
of them and implemented them from the
get-go making reforge's core gameplay
far more confident about what it wants
to be that being a dynamic area
controlled base building war simulation
armory forger may have a long way to go
but it already feels like it knows what
it wants to become but is this what i
want it to be i still play armor like a
single player game or to battle through
scenarios with a friend or two and grey
forger doesn't have any of this it is
very much designed around massively
multiplayer scenarios to get what i want
from it i'd have to plonk a load of
enemies on the map to give them
objectives and then to dive into player
before they all get killed and yet i'm
strangely excited about all of this
because armor has always been about
trying to simulate a large dynamic
battlefield but with tools and game
modes which don't seem designed to allow
for that but this time around the tools
and game modes are we now just need more
stuff and features it's already got the
bot support which is normally the thing
that games lack these days all it needs
now is for you to be able to pause time
in the editor and to be able to save in
those scenarios and it'll be exactly
what i wanted from the older games in
the series imagine any scenario in this
game being able to be played by any
number of players and to be able to be
modified in real time i could play it
through by myself i can invite a friend
to play through it with me they could be
playing it alone while i'm there
adjusting it in the editor in real time
the idea of that doesn't just enhance
the multiplayer it also improves the
single player too provided they actually
add a save and load feature view to be
able to save the state of the world
which right now i can't seem to find
anywhere which is a shame so in a way
root forger is just the thing to help
blur the line between single and
multiplayer in a way that even satisfies
what i want and no game cares about what
i want anymore armory forger costs 25
pounds and i'm reading a lot of people
questioning whether it's worth that
there are a few aspects to this all of
which are understandable but none of
which particularly matter to me firstly
right now there are apparently
horrendous problems with the online
components in the netreg which is a fair
enough thing to complain about but at
the same time is exactly the sort of
issue that early access is supposed to
test for and to address so i'm not too
concerned about that and suspect fixing
it will be the developer's top priority
right now but the bigger question is
what sort of lifespan will a game like
this have when arma 4 is already looming
on the horizon as being the proper
sequel that everybody's waiting for well
for me this is the proper sequel that
i've been waiting for it keeps the
nostalgic bits the same and changes the
bits that i've been hoping would have
been improved upon long ago it is very
much a well-crafted sandbox but without
much content for it yet so we'll just
have to wait and see what happens with
that like i said the way i play this
game is very different from how most
people do and i think that even in its
current state it won't be long before my
friends and i get our money's worth from
it just let us load and save scenarios
please so i suppose how happy i'll be
about reforger depends on the state of
the game come armor 4's release and then
after that i suspect this game's future
will be heavily dependent on what arma 4
is like and what sort of features that
game provides i'm terrible for typing up
video scripts and then never actually
getting around to finishing the videos
less than a month ago i typed up one
about the seagull in the original
operation flashpoint i'll still try to
get that video out at some point because
it's more relevant now than ever but the
general gist of it was operation
flashpoint was a success to me despite
so many parts of it being poorly made
and despite it not really being
compatible with what i wanted from it
some user-made levels required 30
players to be playable others didn't let
you respawn or take control of
characters when you really should have
been able to and the way ruri forger is
designed with its control points and
respawn zones completely resolves the
biggest problem that i had with the
earlier games to me armor reforger is
operation flashpoint without the poorly
made parts it feels like the developers
are finally taking the development of a
military simulation seriously and aren't
just making another armor game but in a
different setting i remember reading
before arma 1 came out about how the
developers wanted to construct a massive
dynamic island-wide battle that raged on
and on at the time i envisioned all that
being single player but i don't think
they ever intended it to be like that
but we might both get what we want from
this title we're just approaching it
from different angles yes it might be
intended to be massively multiplayer but
the bot support's still there and my
dream of being a loner amidst a massive
raging battle all being dynamically
played out across the entire island may
still come true
you