Has ARMA: Cold War Assault Held The Test Of Time?

Last year after the reboot of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II was released, I predicted that war shooters released this decade will inevitably be nothing more than unauthentic demonstrations of current affairs and conflict. The push for high-octane gameplay that rewards the player a narrative and budget like a Huayi Brothers funded action movie; and like anything funded by Huayi Brothers is critiqued heavily for any themes that go against the status quo. Some may say that the war shooter genre has already died from mediocrity, but I believe there’s a way to resurrect the genre by copying off what made shooters of the noughties so memorable.

Last week, I was surfing through the Steam marketplace when I found a game from my childhood that — if copied — could reinvigorate the mainstream shooter market. When I was a kid watching my dad play videogames centred around 20th and 21st century history, games based on WW2 all the way to games like Close Combat: First to Fight would line his bookshelf. Which is why when his work friends recommended a game that let you fight in almost realistic warfare for the time, it trumped all the games we’d ever played before.

ARMA: Cold War Assault, formerly known as Operation Flashpoint: Elite on Xbox, as well as Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis on PC, is a tactical shooter from developer Bohemia Interactive and publisher Codemasters, first released in 2001. Set in 1985, the main campaign begins with the Cold War thawing as the US army reserves are killed by Soviet forces that have invaded a set of fictitious islands that were under the control of the US. As it’s deemed an attack on a NATO country, the US army, and some factions of NATO attempt to retake the islands, with the help of resistance fighters. While ARMA: Cold War Assault sounds rudimentary, the still lively story-telling and chaotic gameplay are more complex than most games released last year.

You play as multiple people throughout the campaign who represent a branch of the military (except the navy). However, you’ll spend most of the game in the boots of David Armstrong, a private who survives the Soviet invasion — saved by the dwindling resistance — and who plays a major role in the war. Alongside an additional campaign titled Resistance where you play as Slava, a civilian turned rebel leader, the accumulated fifty-plus missions, separate short-form missions with no effect to the story, as well as missions you can make using the map editor turns into hours-and-hours of play. It’s all fine and good to get your money’s worth but there’s more to Cold War Assault that made the game stand out from the rest.

If I can take you back to videogames about conflict around the turn of the century, they generally have linear based maps and levels. The locations and environments usually would change per mission but gameplay still forced you to play how the developers wanted you to play. Even the majesty of Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six or the 2002 Ghost Recon revolutionary team-management mechanics fell into the trap of objective markers and maze-like maps to traverse. Operation Flashpoint kept the checkpoints and objectives while throwing away closed spaces for open world battlefields and landscapes.

From word go, missions are set on one of the five islands, with the whole map to explore at your leisure. Well, when I say leisure, I mean you can go wherever you want — only there’s not much to see between grassy hills and the occasional empty town. Missions are short and compact to parts of the islands, but length is outweighed by the quality of gameplay. Simple instructions, with easy to learn controls and the mid-game command mechanics turn what is a battlefield simulator into an in-depth battlefield simulator that anyone can play. Which is why ARMA: Cold War Assault gameplay still holds up with many more aspects incorporated.

One of the aspects is the ingenious choice to let the AI run riot and have selected missions — mostly the special operations where you play as an ex-operative pulled back into the field for covert jobs — will contain ramifications if you failed objectives. Granted, AI have inbuilt pathways that they follow and code, stopping them from going rogue and deserting their posts; practically soft locking you from completing combat objectives. What the AI can do — both ally and opposition — is operate like functioning combatants, using binoculars to scout enemy positions, bark orders and strategize on the fly. Stepping back, you can let the game run itself without intervening. To give an example, if you pin down a squad inside a city and the soviet squad leader is still alive, you can hear him commanding troops to attempt flanking movements, or simply an order to retreat.  

Another reason is your role in the game. While endgame missions task you with orchestrating major engagements, you are no more than a cog in the war machine with one cavoite. Missions will fail when you die and you’ll have to restart or revert back to your one save per mission, and is the only time you can fail. Your team can all die, towns blown up and half a magazine to your name, as long as you finish the objectives, you pass and get to see your team leader in cutscenes walk around like didn’t get shot dead.

But that does not mean you are immortal. Without aid from a medic, shot in the legs and you crawl, arms and you cannot aim straight, and I don’t have to tell you what happens if you get a head injury. Danger and the potential of a quick death leads you to keep on the defence every time you’re out in the open or pinned down. Vehicle missions like the tank and helicopter missions will ease the pressure of small arms fire, but the Soviets will have brought in the big guns, spicing up the whole campaign when you’re bored of trigger discipline and want to let off a Sabot round into the side of a T-72.

For anyone interested in playing this game, I have to warn you it is visually worn. As the game is old enough to drink, textures — as well as the graphics and character models — are worse for weather, the ground textures are more like smudges of colour, building and destructive models will sometimes deflate or structural frames will jut out. People have blank expressions as their faces superimposed images of developers or maybe the voice actors. Not to mention the terrain is too lumpy to be realistic, however the sound effects like rumbling engines and gunshots’ audio quality isn’t as bad as you’d think. In conclusion, if you can look further than aesthetics, this game is right up your alley.

ARMA: Cold War Assault has something I haven’t seen in a AAA shooter in a long time as the game lets the gameplay and experiences the player has while fighting against smart AI surpasses a carefully curated storyline from Call of Duty or Battlefield ever could. You can have scripted events that wows the player on their first run, but having events occur due to the player’s actions makes the playthrough more personal including the mistakes you can make which can lead to teammates dying for no reason. Or in my playthrough, reorganising a convey that was ambushed so the supplies could make it to their destination which ended in one of the trucks getting hit by an RPG that was meant for me.

Outside the campaign and single player missions is a map editor that lets you make your own missions. As a kid, making up engagements was the main thing I did when playing. As the campaign can be hard due to the uncertainty of death, as well as the patience you retry the covert missions, creating scenarios where I was in the advantage was more fun. The map editor can also be used to familiarise the player to maps, the array of soldiers, arsenal and vehicles (land and air) to have free reign over. Many people I know who have played ARMA: Cold War Assault make their character a parachuting soldier, so they can observe the whole map from above.

The direction Bohemia Interactive took Operation Flashpoint’s design and gameplay into the subsequent Arma series; while Codemasters’ sequel Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising reinvented the genre by implementing existing shooter mechanics to broad the game to console players divided some fans, but was a better decision as each group had their own ideas of how they wanted their games to play. Unfortunately, Operation Flashpoint seems to be a dead IP after the mediocre reviews of the third instalment, Red River. However, Arma 3, and the early access Arma: Reforger have tweaked the original formula with better UI and graphics as well as recreating an island from Cold War Assault, Malden leading the former to be one of the best milsims (military simulators) on the market to date.

With games like Squad, Insurgency: Sandstorm and Call to Arms having similar gameplay and — in lesser words — atmosphere that Arma/OF fans love, there is still a fanbase that would accept current shooters if they paid more attention to replay value as multiplayer. Personally, a game I want to see implement Arma’s style of gameplay is the infamous game, Six Days in Fallujah. In 2004, the original developers Atomic Games were getting assistance from U.S. Marines for a project to help the military when the marines were set to Fallujah. When they came back, the stories they told to the team inspired them to start working on the title as a way to honour those who help them, as well as providing an insight on what war really looks like.

The game was later destroyed by backlash from the media who believed the developers were doing the opposite and the game almost died along with the company in 2011. Fortunately, Highwire Games have been working on the title with no announced date of release. A game with a history like Six Days in Fallujah would definitely have a chance to make an authentic war game that anyone can play. Respectfully, Highwire Games have interviewed veterans that fought in the conflict, as well as Iraqi residents who lived and witnessed the urban engagements in the city; so for them to butcher the historical aspects of the game is unlikely. However,  between you and me, if Highwire Games turns the game into a Battlefield clone, I will spit harder than the woodchipper in Fargo.