Game Zone: Arma Tactics

by daiashi

About The Game

Arma Tactics takes the best from the popular strategy genre, and moves across platforms. The finest assets used in the critically acclaimed Arma™ series on PC now come to life on the Android, iOS and Steam platform. Arma Tactics is a turn-based close-combat strategy game, where the player takes control of a four-member Special Forces team. There are no given strategies, rails to move on, or paths to follow; it's up to the player to decide how he will play through both the story-driven missions and generated missions with randomized objectives. Whether using stealth or a more direct approach, players will need to use their strategic thinking and use both basic and advanced weaponry while facing many different opponents - ranging from unorganized local militia to smart and skilled mercenaries. With highly re-playable missions, weapons to unlock and whole campaigns to be regularly added, Arma Tactics offers many hours of intense ever-changing action.

Main Features

Explore highly detailed battlefield environments that come to life with sophisticated particle systems and post-process effects. See your men come to life with realistic animations captured by a powerful motion-capture solution. Lead them through a thrilling single player campaign or improve your skills in generated missions. Gather experience points to level up your characters, upgrade weapons and unlock special equipment. You can choose difficulty level, helping to make sure the game is fun to play for both casual players and hardcore gamers, and take part in challenging special game modes.

For me, the game seemed a lot like Jagged Alliance, if anyone remembers that title. Controls, in my opinion, are not as polished as they should be. Game play is pretty fluid in that you are not jumping all over the place as you play through the story line. Although the minimum system requirements are stated below, and I do exceed these, there was a little lag at times as there are not many graphic changes in the options. I have found that all of the games in the Arma series simply do not run very well on a computer with the minimum specs. It may be the port to Linux or an Nvidia graphics driver issue. Nevertheless, it is still a fun game and I would recommend it if you are into the turn base strategy type games. If you have some time on your hands and like this series, this game may just fill those shoes.

System requirements

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About The Company

Established in 1999 in Prague, Czech Republic, Bohemia Interactive is an independent game development studio that focuses on developing original, state of the art computer entertainment and simulation software, including the research of proprietary advanced real-time 3D graphics, artificial intelligence and physical simulation technologies for real-time interactive environments.

Operation Flashpoint*, Bohemia Interactive's debut game published by Codemasters in 2001, became the No. 1 best-selling PC game around the world and has won many international awards, including "Game of The Year" and "Best Action Game." It was later renamed to Arma: Cold War Assault.

Bohemia Interactive's second major release, Arma: Armed Assault, followed in 2007, and in the same year, the Arma: Queen's Gambit expansion pack was released.

Arma 2, another hit in the series of tactical military shooters, released worldwide during summer 2009 and was placed in the top positions of official PC charts around the world immediately thereafter. Arma 2 won "Most PC" Game in the 2009 PC Gamer Awards and is featured 14th in their "Best PC Game of all time".

Following the release of Arma 2, the standalone expansion pack Arma 2: Operation Arrowhead was developed. This massive expansion was strongly received by both critics and fans alike; reviews considered it as surpassing the previous title and building on its strong mil-sim heritage. The 'Armaverse' was then expanded further by the hugely popular British Armed Forces (BAF), Private Military Company (PMC) and the Army of the Czech Republic (ACR) DLCs. To date, the Arma series has sold over 5 million units.

In November 2011, Bohemia Interactive released Take On Helicopters, an authentic civilian helicopter game set in a virtual recreation of Seattle. It was well received, with multiple reviewers praising its refreshing take on the flight sim genre. The game was reinforced shortly after by the Take On Helicopters: Hinds expansion pack and the free Noisecontrollers and Rearm ed DLCs.

About a year later, in October 2012, Bohemia Interactive shipped Carrier Command: Gaea Mission for Windows PC and Xbox 360. Based on the classic game from 1988, it was the first multiplatform title to launch under the Bohemia Interactive flag.

Recently, the studio saw its open attitude towards modding rewarded by the massive success of the DayZ survival mod for Arma 2: Combined Operations. With over a million players, the creator of DayZ - Dean Hall -- has announced a partnership with Bohemia Interactive to create a standalone version of DayZ.

This year, on September 12, the most recent instalment in the successful Arma series -- Arma 3 - was released. Starting with the Arma 3 Alpha in March, people were invited to participate in the game's development ahead of the game's official release. Building upon the Alpha's massive success, the game transitioned into Beta in June -- bringing along further refinements as well as new playable content. The final game introduced new playable and sandbox content, plus the massive 270 km² Altis terrain. The official single player campaign is scheduled for release across three DLC episodes.

In addition to Arma 3, in 2013, the Arma franchise also moved into the turn-based strategy genre, with the release of Arma Tactics on Android, iOS, PC, Linux and Mac. Holding on to Arma's signature freedom, players take control of a four-member Special Forces team, tasked with a diverse set of missions and no given strategies or rails to move on.

Bohemia Interactive recently expanded its Take On series with the brand new space exploration sim game: Take On Mars. In Take On Mars, players take on the role of a Rover Operator to explore real-life locations on Mars. The game is currently available as an Early Access title on Steam.

Bohemia Interactive won the 2001 Best PC Game Developer award at London's ECTS exhibition and Rookie Studio of the Year award at GDC 2002.

Some Gameplay Screenshots

Getting It To Run

You will require just an updated PCLinuxOS system, the Steam launcher from Synaptic, and a Steam account. There is a demo available, so I would recommend that you grab this first to get an idea if your system can play it.