Given the well-known bright and sore spots of the ArmA 2 engine, it feels like a self-inflicted shot fired from the “it-must-have-this” gun that the mainstream market is seemingly handling across the board. The canned single player scenarios are not the best selling point of Iron Front. A few minutes later my officer pulled back towards friendly lines without telling me a word, leaving me with an incomplete mission to execute on my own.
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In one mission, my unarmored vehicle driver decided to go through a road blocked with emplaced obstacles while we were bombarded by a mortar barrage. Although the ArmA 2 engine features a very powerful and customizable virtual world, it doesn’t cope very well when one context-rich tactical situation is put on top of the other. Other example is the profuse use of scripts and triggers in the single player missions and campaign. In the training camp, where everybody was running from station to station like in the middle of an air raid. I have travelled in a truck with fellow AI soldiers who were all looking at me and moving their lips while actually only one of them was actually talking.
These animations are too generic to cover the complexities of human interaction. One example is the use of long cutscenes that make use of animations. It is perplexing that the developers of Iron Front have not made use of hindsight to avoid areas where the ArmA 2 engine doesn’t fare well. Iron Front it is a World War II ArmA 2 and it shows all great achievements and pitfalls of the engine. The mission editor can be used to throw some units and waypoints on a map for quick fun or (in the hands of an experienced user) can be used to simulate complex events and behaviors for the virtual units. From just a band of guys that just get together for a cooperative match to fully drilled groups of organized "clans" (to borrow from the mainstream mambo jambo) that follow a chain of command and real battle drill. Maybe you are feeling more brave and want to brush up some serious tactical skills? Yeah, ArmA 2 can do that.
If nothing helps your appetite for easy targets, there is a mission editor (one of the best scenario editors out there) that will allow you to edit and play your scenario without too much fuss. Are you feeling like blowing up some stuff without too much involvement? Somebody has certainly made a single-player mission for your needs, or there are plenty of servers around to gun and run at your pleasure. On the other hand is one of the most (if not the best) versatile tactical sandbox for combat simulation. Your virtual character has to skirt around the most ridiculously small obstacles and will drive vehicles like if it was under the influence of alcohol.
On one hand, it is moody, a hardware hog and a frequent immersion killer. No other engine can unchain both deep hate and love, sometimes even in the same person in a short period of time. This engine is a bit of a bit of a cult among first person shooters (here defined as in the mainstream sense). That being said, let’s bring in the ArmA 2 engine from which Iron Front was made. It’s just that I read many reviews of Iron Front in the mainstream press, and they are measuring it with the same old rusty metric tape. Millions of gamers are happy to pay prime dollar to be spoon-fed the same applesauce over and over again, and I have nothing against these gamers or the mainstream industry itself. It is all about getting past checkpoints (don’t you dare making a decision on your own, follow the bloody waypoint), belated rewards (don’t get bored yet, you are just 45 points from unlocking a flashlight) and great cut scenes to compensate for the lack of virtue of the virtual world in suspending the gamer’s disbelief. When it comes to the so-called “first person shooters genre”, the specialized press and the market have settled for standards which are about revenues in the hundred millions, Hollywood-style storylines and a formulaic gameplay experience. One of the biggest ironies of the current huge diversity in computer games is the almost universal acceptance that there are just a handful of gaming genres where you can bin everything published.
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