This game surprised the hell out of me. Yeah, the learning curve is more of a cliff, it can be a little buggy sometimes, and the story isn't going to knock your socks off, but I think this may be the most fun and engaging game I've played in a long time.

I've barely played any of the Arma games, the most amount being spent many years ago on the DayZ mod as a kid, but they always seemed so impenetrable to me. Getting shot by a dude hiding in a bush 200m away was never my idea of fun, nor commanding multiple different AI in a complicated series of menus and sub menus. I assumed the multiplayer would be even worse and stuck faaar away from it. Recently however, I'd been in the mood for more tactical shooters, finding myself playing hours upon hours of Hell Let Loose, the first dozen or two spent very frustrated with my inability to spot hostiles before they saw me, until I decided to just play medic and follow my squad or teammates around. Eventually, as I got more invested in the game, I thought how cool it might be to have something that played similarly, but with a singleplayer campaign vs AI, or even something co-op. Since it seems most tactical shooters within the past decade have been entirely multiplayer, without a smidge of AI to fight, or are otherwise in Early Access, it seemed Arma 3 was the only one with anything like that. I was honestly shocked to find out it even had a campaign, but assumed it would be something rather generic, something touting itself as the ultimate military simulation video game may not be too similar to something like Call of Duty 4, but it would probably be missions like clearing town, doing some sabotage maybe, escorting a convoy, all with no story besides pre-mission briefings going over some boring reason why I'm doing any of this. Turns out nearly all of that was wrong, and a few missions in I decided I wanted to play this series from start to finish.

Arma 3 primarily took place in first person view, with story being told like a Call of Duty game basically, but Cold War Crisis starts with full (if a little janky) cinematic cutscenes that are surprisingly LONG, and introduce a larger amount of more easily identifiable and unique characters. Playing as Corporal Armstrong, your group of dudes starts to hear rumors about unknown troops on the neutral island micro-state of Everon. Deploying from nearby NATO controlled Malden, a LONG campaign of fairly typical Cold War plot begins to play out, carried by a cozy Aliens/Halo CE vibe with your wisecracking squadmates and silly voice acting, as well as the excellent score and some pretty unique feeling moments in the extremely varied missions, like when you start alone, lost in a forest, hostiles all over the island, and must make your way to the extraction point in a non-linear path you choose, encountering different enemy vehicles or patrols, or small friendly squads attempting to survive just as you are, and can choose to let them be and distract the enemy, or help them take the enemy out. Another mission has you escape from a prison camp without any weapons or a map, having to scrounge for weapons and find the north star so you can orient and make your way south to safety, or maybe steal multiple different vehicles you can use to make your escape. There are also some pretty excellent stealth missions with multiple ways to complete your objectives, like one where I drove a bunch of tanks I had to blow up next to a refueling center and only had to blow that up to get rid of them all in one go. The variety, story context, and creative freedom in which you can tackle some missions made me wish MGSV was more like this...

While the tutorials the game gives you are often helpful, not everything you need to know is contained within them. I found myself consulting the manual a few times, and it definitely took 5-10 missions before I started to get the hang of it. There are mid-mission checkpoints only on some of the larger missions, and otherwise only one save per level, but given the devs never reimplemented this limitation, I would sometimes use the cheat to save multiple times, especially on one particularly painful mission that stands out for how long and grueling it is. Being able to save made said mission actually kind of fun, but sometimes it's fun to see if you can avoid saving as long as you can.

Vehicle usage, tank commanding, and squad commanding isn't nearly as bad as I thought either, becoming mostly intuitive pretty quickly, and I found even when taking a mostly hands off approach to my squad, if given even one or two basic orders on how to approach potential combat, they usually last longer than squads not controlled by you early on. You can simply adjust their pace and readiness level, tell them to prone when you do, find cover, or give more complex commands like clicking somewhere in the world or on the map to have them move there, then tell them to watch a direction while hiding in a bush. Micromanaging is unnecessary and you can choose to engage very little if at all in commanding or go a little more in depth and get results both ways.

The comfy atmosphere, excellent and varied mission design, and especially how satisfying it is to learn and become good make this game an absolute joy, and probably one of my favorite shooters at this point. If tactical shooters interest you but you're intimidated by how complex and difficult they can be, and with a dull setting and atmosphere to boot, or if you're looking for something with large, open maps with freedom to tackle objectives in several different ways while not being as soulless and copy paste as a Ubisoft open world, I HIGHLY recommend giving this game a shot. Yes, it's a realistic simulation of military combat, but it's also so, so much more than that.