[Zappatime]

Yeah, I'm a big Arma2 fan and the mod community is prolific to say the least, there's some truely great addons for it. To my mind it shares many similarities with COD, it can look absolutely fantastic in certain situations, the vehicle models are very sharp, but at other times slow loading textures and dipping frame rates when the going gets hectic can dilute the enjoyment.

I'd say it runs quite similarly to COD in many ways too, in its vanilla form out of the box it probably runs much better than COD, but it does depend what mods you end up adding, some of the nice explosion and effects eyecandy can do serious damage to its overall performance, but there's such a wealth of stuff to go at its a case of try it and see. Very tweakable setup helps.

Its worth remembering that Arma2 is really a third iteration release, being an evolution starting with Operation Flashpoint> Arma> Arma2 and as I recall my experiences with Arma in particular were not good at the time, it didnt run at all well with the hardware I had.

Anybody who loves open ended simulations, great mod community support and powerful mission editing software shouldn't hesitate to try it in my opinion, its very immersive, and given time COD has every chance of being regarded in the same vein.