Game Reviews

At one point during Bohemia Interactive's presentation at the IGN offices, Senior Artist Jan Prazak hovers in a helicopter, looking at an enemy patrol three kilometers away. He casually fires a missile and then keeps on talking, painting a laser dot on the lead vehicle that's glowing white on the thermal display. A couple of minutes later, the missile completes its journey over the desert hills and impacts, blowing the convoy to kingdom come. "OK", Prazak says. "Next target."

This is a big game.

But considering the pedigree on display here, the size was never in question; the Arma series has always been about warfare on a country-wide scale, and with Operation Arrowhead we're leaving the green hills of Eastern Europe for an altogether sunnier climate. A few years have passed since the Chernarussian debacle of Arma 2 and the focus has shifted to the Middle East, the action taking place in the ambiguously named Takistan.

The single player campaign, the eponymous Arrowhead, centers around a US Army deployment into Takistan to deal with the kinds of threats you'd expect to find in a volatile, war-torn country. Unlike Arma 2's campaign, there will be no central character to follow, instead putting you into the roles of several servicemen in different disciplines such as infantryman, tank commander and chopper pilot to make the most of the content supplied – Prazak attests that this will the most user-friendly iteration of the series yet. Three large maps are included, two as huge swathes of countryside, one compromising of a huge, sprawling city. However, that's not the end of the available terrain. As Prazak explained, these three maps are unlimited in scope. If you drive beyond the borders of the in-game map, you'll find an endless vista of procedurally generated landmass extending far beyond the boundaries of the three handcrafted maps.