Recent reviews by Cricket

So much potential to grow!

ThisBeen playing ARMA for almost 10 years now. It’s grown alongside me, and has created some of the most memorable moments I’ve ever experienced in a videogame. It’s one of those games which, when it finally ‘clicks’ with you, never quite leaves you. You always find yourself going back to it. It’s not a game which necessarily empowers you like DOOM or Wolfenstein, but the pay-off from successfully pulling off that mission, that flank, that firing solution, that landing, even that single shot, is unparalleled.

I’ll always remember the moody fog of the APEX Protocol co-op missions as me and my friend crawled through the jungle, silently taking out patrols hunting for us with flashlights dancing in the dark. I’ll always remember finally Escaping from Tanoa after six hours with my mates — it felt like a hiking trip by the end. I’ll always remember staying prone in a ghillie suit as a whole platoon of Russians patrolled past my squad, just like in All Ghillied Up. No other game can recreate the thrill or complexity of these memories in an emergent and inherently personal manner.

My friends and I, after ten years, have talked for hours about that one mission which went so wrong or that incredible shot one of us made across a whole valley, or just how much we associate some terrains like Sahrani or Stratis with our first years as teenagers back at school. ARMA, for me, is an experience equal in its thrills and frustrations as it is in its nostalgia — you come to learn these towns, these fields, these roads and valleys and recall them each as affectionately as the other. Sure, things go wrong: a miscommunication is made, a helicopter crashes, the physics engine freaks out, or the server messes up, but most of the time, you’ll laugh through it.

ARMA is unlike any other game — any other experience. I think this ramble has been quite open in displaying just how much it means to me, and how much it will continue to mean to me. I can assure you, if you give it a chance, it will quickly mean as much to you too.