I've had my eye on it for a long time. My brother and I love military shooters of a certain breed and hate others.

Everything I've heard states that Arma II has "clunky" controls. I don't know what that means. Does it mean that it's hard to do what you want to do? Or that you struggle with natural human limitations?

What sort of multiplayer battles happen? Does it have capture points like Battlefield? Squads? If someone could describe to me how multiplayer games work, it would help a lot.

Also, can this run on an Intel HD 4000 on-board graphics card? I have an 8800 GTX, but my brother's best machine only has a the Intel HD 4000.

Thanks to anyone who can help me out a bit with this!


P.S. Is this stuff common? http://www.gog.com/forum/arma_series/why_is_this_game_still_so_incredibly_unplayably_buggy

About the controls: It may have a rather unusual (not illogical) controls (when you compare it to standard FPS) and you may have to learn more key bindings to fully control the game, but I think there will be no problem with controls after an hour in the game

About the graphics: You may "run" the game with that Intel card, but I doubt it will run smoothly (maybe on the lowest settings)

Thank you very much for a helpful reply!

Just a quick update: I got it and I love it so far. I skipped the tutorial just to see how horrid the controls were. Not so bad that I couldn't play. I think I'll just learn bit by bit how the game works with the specifics.

I was actually reviewing this in my head yesterday as I was playing the game. I thought "clunky is a terrible way to describe these controls." Instead, I think "less automated and feature-rich" would be a good description. No auto-reload, # keys talk to people and the middle mouse button does a million things.

So far, I've done a full scenario about 4 or 5 times until I got good, I practiced on the carrier, and did the first mission. Already, I've learned that this is not a FPS. It's a strategy-FPS-RPG mix. And I'm loving it.

BF3 Ultimate was just on sale on Amazon and I wasn't even tempted to get it (I had BF3 on XBOX console, but they updated it so many times that it occupied more than my hard drive could hold while keeping a few games I wanted on there) (btw, I also have a long-standing hate for EA due to multiple screw-overs).

ARMA 2 is my game. I tried DayZ and didn't really like it, but the actual ARMA game is totally my cup of tea. I can't wait to see where all the missions take me.

You have to let go of previous notions of what a game is. People who say the controls are "clunky" are usually not people who play these kind of military simulators. You can not move with the same kinetic force as in a typical first person shooter and you have more specific poses and movement styles to choose from than said shooters (ie there is more than just stand, crouch, run and walk). You can not run and gun in this game because this is a game where you are controlling a normal human being, not an abstract floating first person camera on a stick. You head is actually modelled separately from your body and hands, you can actually look over your own shoulder, among other things! Most actions concerned with just the character you are controlling can be found on the mouse wheel scroll and keyboard shortcuts. Things only get complicated when you factor in the complex orders you can issue to a near limitless number of AI squad members...

Now on to why I said you must let go of some ideas. This game is not a single game, full package with everything prepared and presented to you. Yes, there are singleplayer campaigns to dive into. There are short set piece singleplayer scenarios to try. There are also a few multiplayer scenarios to play. The reason I'm making this very strange point is because you're asking about stuff like game objectives and squad systems. Maybe you're wondering if this is like Battlefield where you can just jump into a vehicle and use it. The easy answer is "Yeah, it can be". The full answer is more like "This game can be anything you construct it to be, so long as you're trying to create a military simulation". The objective of the game can be just about anything you or any scenario creator can think of. Squads can be almost anything you or another scenario creator can think of, either by having your character (and possibly other multiplayer characters) be their own one-man squads, or you can have several players make up a squad, or one or more players plus a seemingly endless number of AI controlled bots making up a single squad.

As you may have noticed, I keep mentioning scenarios. There is a very powerful editor included with the game and this is where the actual game for the gamer is created. On it's own, ArmA 2 is just a world simulator with an empty "island" where nothing is going on (except the sun sets and rises in real time). You have to load or create your own scenario to turn it into a game. The base game is bundled with some scenarios that function much like Battlefield in that you have capture points spread across the map, and a simple economy system with which you buy gear and vehicles. The base game is also bundled with a number of singleplayer and cooperative scenarios that take anything from 15 minutes to several hours to complete. Multiplayer scenarios created by ArmA 2 players can be almost ANYTHING, but most of them are cooperative games because pretending to be real life soldiers together is much more fun than shooting at each other like you're in the woods playing paintball.

ArmA 2 is very big with "Mil-Sim" gaming groups who set up huge scenarios meant to emulate realistic military operations. You can have some 60+ players taking on different roles in assaults through the streets of Fallujah (on a famous custom map) against partially random AI units (usually squads of soldiers or vehicles working together). Just check out 2-3 hour long playthroughs of guys slowly creeping up on villages, all the while communicating and forming plans, perhaps with a bit of roleplaying. Some even use mods that simulate real life radio traffic that is cut off by valleys etc.

If you want to play a game, this might not be for you. If you want a shooter, then you're probably better off looking somewhere else still. If you want to set up a fairly realistic playground where you and your buddies can pretend to be soldiers and just live the life, then this is the definitive game, so long as you can stand all the hard work that goes into preparing everything. Even if you just want to mess around with the editor and create ridiculously large AI battles for you to run into with gun in hand, this is the one game that can deliver! It really helps if you have some serious knowledge about military topics (NOT something you learn from games and movies) or else you might find the shooting mechanics confusing and the pace of the action strangely slow (which is what happen when you give guns to real human beings).

Do you recommend any? I think I'm ready to join a group but don't really know what to even look for.

Thanks!