Here’s @BeachAV8R recent review of some Arma 3 mission:
Articles - Mudspike Forums
So the first part is Chris’s text and the 2nd is a ‘continuation’ asking @discobot to carry on writing it.
I think we’ve found a new reviewer!
"A Game Review.
This review of the single-player campaign is intended to give an overview and some flavor of the campaign, without ruining the storyline for those that seek to play it in the future – so details will be purposely vague. The premise of the campaign is simple – it is August 1983 and East German forces have crossed into West Germany along the northern border. The campaign kicks off with some nice, albeit simple cut scenes that start events unfolding.
Briefings are well done, voiced over in German, but with English subtitles. The graphics on the map provide an overview of the situation, objectives, and presumed friendly and enemy force dispositions.
Roles: The player assumes two roles during the course of the campaign: an infantry soldier – Pvt. Klemmer, and a tank platoon commander – Sgt. Brandt. The mix of mission types assigned to each role is a nice feature that provides a mix of combat that will probably appeal to most people. I was particularly happy to see that I wasn’t overwhelmed in most missions, although managing the crews of the four tanks in your platoon could sometimes leave my own tank exposed while I tried to preserve the lives of those under my command."
@Discobot: The missions themselves are well done. There is an excellent mix of tank combat, infantry combat, and combined arms. The missions are varied, and you’ll get to play some urban warfare and a little bit of armor on armor fighting as well. It is, however, a linear campaign that will lead you from one mission to the next. Some of the missions are quite challenging, and in fact, I got myself killed every time I tried to take on the mission called “1st Assault” while on the Pz. IV. There are some new features that I wasn’t used to, but didn’t cause me any problems. For instance, you can choose whether you want to move your turret to the left or right by pushing the ‘A’ key. If you push ‘A’ to the left, it will move the turret left and if you push ‘A’ to the right, the turret will move to the right. This sounds confusing, but it really isn’t – once you try it.
The missions were enjoyable and the objectives were clear, although there were a few places where I didn’t quite understand the mission objectives. I was also a little confused by the fact that the objectives would have you moving from one point to another on the map, but I would only get a partial completion if I arrived at the second point on the map. For instance, in the mission called “1st Assault,” your objective is to get to the town of Kerzensee. Once you get there, you’ll get a partial completion of the objective. However, if you then move to the next objective, you’ll get a full completion of the objective. It wasn’t a big deal, but it did make me wonder if I was missing something.
Some of the missions did have some glitches. For instance, there is a mission called “2nd Assault.” I got the full completion of the mission, and was getting my medals and rewards, but then the game froze. I had to restart the emulator and reload the mission to get the game to continue. This happened again in the mission called “3rd Assault” where I had to reload the mission once more. I also had a couple of missions where I completed the mission, but didn’t get credit for the full completion. I had to reload the mission to get credit for a full completion.
The missions were challenging, which was a good thing, but I did find the game a little frustrating at times. I found some of the missions a little short, which made me feel like the mission was cut short. For instance, in the mission called “2nd Assault,” I was pretty confident that I had completed the mission objectives, but when I moved to exit the map, I was told that I had not completed the mission. This happened twice. In the first case, I had to reload the mission to get a full completion, and in the second case, the mission ended before I got the full completion. I found another mission called “4th Assault” to be particularly frustrating.
to it via API but it’s not trivial. There’s also an annoying issue of API usage limits I need to abide for, as it’s my companies private access to the API I’m using. I don’t want to hook it up to open web and then get banned for it generating porn stories while I sleep etc. 