ARMA: Cold War Assault

This is quite an awesome game. When the game came out and I played it for my first time, I was so hooked and addicted to the game. I could even mutter "Contact enemy BMP at 500 meters! 1, Target Officer 3 o'clock! 3 Target Rifleman! 5 engage Machinegunner at 12 o'clock!" It was a sign I loved the game so much and played it so much I was losing my sleep. This contains the entire Operation Flashpoint GOTY edition: Operation Flashpoint, Operation Flashpoint: Red Hammer, and Operation Flashpoint: Resistance. The first OFP is a great game. It immerses you into a brief but sporadic storyline woven and told from different perspectives: Armstrong, an up-and-coming private; James Gastovski, former CIA spy and Navy SEAL operator, and Hammer, an US Army "Patton" tank commander. You're facing off an unknown enemy who is about to overtake Everon. You push on unknowingly until contact hits! Rifle fire erupts into the air, you duck and crawl for cover. You hope to find the enemy and gun them down before they get you! If they do, a letter to your nice, hot gorgeous wife will be sent! It is up to you to save yourself, and not only yourself, and your other squadmates! War is brutal but it has never been beautiful like this game, a technological achievement! OFP: Red Hammer involves an Red Army Corporal named Dmitriy who is tasked with overtaking Everon. He is joined up with his comrades and soon asasults an entire company of incompetent civilians. Orders were distilled from above: execute these rabble, comrades! They're nothing to us! Dmitriy is in deep turmoil, torn between killing those civilians and acting on those orders brutally. A good game until you reach the mission where Chinooks suddenly hover above your position and streams of Marines paratroop off them. There were missing files that said you were missing Strukas (RPG weapons) and specific texture files. Today, we couldn't find them so I'm not so sure if gog has included them. OFP: Resistance is the toughest of all the bunch. You play as Victor Troska who decidedly lives in Nogova, a beautiful republic known for its quaint villages, beautifully crafted roads, and awesome beaches where hot Russian-looking babes goes to visit (I'm only embellishing here so give me a break :P). All hell breaks loose when a communist man named Beth Ostrovsky decided to ask Russia to help assist in taking over Nogova. You must pick up the rest of your pieces, revisit your past, and hope to succeed in against the Red Army to free a once-beautiful republic. Nogova must be freed if you hope to see your friends alive. All in all, great games. I gave it 4 stars because I am not so sure if gog.com has included the missing files, textures, and others that didn't come packaged with the GOTY edition. If they did, I would give out five stars but I am skeptical as if this remains the same GOTY I received years ago, good luck in finding those missing files because they can't be google-able. I loved this game more than I did any other military sim and ArmA 1, 2, and 3 are always the successors of this game!

In ArmA: Cold War Assault, you can be killed in one or two shots. With no minimap or radar, the only way to locate enemies is to pull out your map... and possibly die in the process. Prepare to drop dead from a headshot and literally not see it coming. You can save only once per mission. Basically, this game is uncompromisingly hardcore: even on "Cadet" difficulty, you'll fail your mission a lot. But this intensity makes the game feel realistic and rewarding. Nerve-wracking, but fun and potentially addicting. While the campaign is linear, with objectives that must be completed in order and little room for experimentation, it takes place in huge maps. The view distance is super impressive. When you're not fighting for your life (which is rare), you can enjoy the idyllic scenery. What's great is that outside of the campaign, these open-ended maps become your sandbox. You can create your own missions and situate them anywhere you want. Like that village over there? How about designing a scenario where one team defends it from an attacking force? Unfortunately, the game's not perfect. I highly recommend you install the unofficial patch, ArmA Resistance. Otherwise, you may face game-breaking bugs. For example, in one mission, your squad is supposed to get in a truck and drive to an evacuation point. But if your AI-controlled allies decide not to drive, they'll instead try to go there on foot, running across the map (but turning back halfway and running back to where you came from). This patch makes the missions and scripted events work properly.

Arma: Cold War Assault is the re-released version of Operation Flashpoint originally developed by Bohemia Interactive back in 2001. It is an oldie but a goodie. From a 2023 standpoint, some of the game's mechanics look dated, but overall, Arma CWA has stood the test of time. The graphics are dated, but you stop caring after a couple of hours. What is harder to oversee is the clunkiness, the bugs, and the optimization issues, of which still plenty remain. For example, I found it impossible to run the game on its Highest settings on a 20- series RTX card and a 9th Gen Intel i7 CPU with 16Gb of RAM and an SSD some 24 years post-release! Some missions were outright broken and couldn't be finished without changing the settings because the game kept crashing (i.e., Maverick). At least it natively supports wider screen resolutions, which is a godsend. The FOV didn't bother me, but I think you can change that either in the game menu or with a command line. The physics engine is goofy and broken sometimes, but not to the point that it's distracting. Overall, Arma: Cold War Assault remains highly playable and addictive from start to finish, with a fantastic sense of freedom and a tactical approach to combat. The AI is stupid, but the friendly units can be very useful if used properly. The voice acting is solid across the board, and the radio commands are legendary at this point, so there is no reason not to use them. The game seemed crushingly difficult back in the day, and there is still a learning curve to it, but you can get good fairly quickly and enjoy the sandbox. By the way, if the game is too slow, with "+," you can enjoy it 2x or 4x faster;)

I never played Operation Flashpoint back in the day; however, when I bought ArmA, I heard ArmA was branched off from this game. Operation Flashpoint is essentially the exact same game as ArmA, except ArmA has better graphics and has poor performance on any computer. I bought Operation Flashpoint because I wanted to play a game like ArmA than ran better on my computer. I give a 4/5 star due to the fact that Operation Flashpoint still has some minor performance issues regarding distance viewing, but that is about it.

It even better than it successor, the Operation Flashpoint series, especially Red River, because the AI of OF:RR is dumb. I like better the predecessor, Arma.