Arma 3
Worth it · Shooter · 2013
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $29.99.
- Length
- 19.5h
- Value
- $1.54/hr
- Reviews
- 90% positive
Watch this gameOne email when it is worth buying. Your call on what that means.
Get one email when Arma 3 is worth buying.
One email per game. Unsubscribe in a click.
Minimum on the Steam store: 8 GB of memory, 50 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS.
Experience true combat gameplay in a massive military sandbox. Deploy with a wide variety of single- and multiplayer content, a massive arsenal of modern weapons and vehicles, and limitless opportunities for content creation. Authentic, diverse, open - Arma 3 sends you to war.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
It has never been cheaper than $2.99. That was June 2024. It has been discounted 104 times in the 13 years tracked here, typically at 75 percent off, with about 5 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 2 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 5 weeks.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 5 percent on value. It is pricier than 90 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 85 percent. It outscores the games it most resembles, including Arma 2: Operation Arrowhead ($19.99, scores 67) and ARMA: Gold Edition ($9.99, scores 46).
Critics scored it 74. Players sit 16 points higher at 90 percent, which usually means a game that plays better than it reviews.
Of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 33 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written April 2026 to September 2026. That is more refunded reviewers than 9 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 725 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 34 have a larger share. The typical game sits near 5 in 1,000, so the score docks it. 4 of the 33 refunded reviewers were past Valve's two-hour window when they wrote the review. Inside the two-hour refund window, 59 percent of the 11,673 reviews written there were positive, against 90 percent overall, and those are 5 percent of everything written about it.
19.5 hours to finish it, 121 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 6.2 times the campaign.
Still 7.2K concurrent players, 13 years in.
The drop-off
93% start to <1% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
7,181 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
Hey kiddo, Handsome Jack here... and I just played Arma 3, and apparently someone looked at military simulators and thought, "You know what this needs? A game where it takes twelve minutes to figure out how to stand up." Finally. A simulator for real workplace efficiency. You start the game thinking you're an elite soldier. Five minutes later you're lying face-down in a bush because you pressed the wrong button and...
⭐⭐⭐ I got Arma 3 expecting to play solo and shoot some bad guys in KOTH. Somehow, I ended up making friends, joined a community, and spent more time arguing about tactics than actually shooting anything. Started as a lonely solo player and somehow found a bunch of absolute idiots who I now consider friends. We've had epic missions, hilarious disasters, accidental teamkills, vehicles exploding for no reason, and at...
Nothing is going to beat this game in terms of combination of realism , tactics, strategy, modding capabilities any time soon. Maybe one day only arma 4 will be able to beat it. Nothing really comes close. Artillery engages 20+ km away, 3+ km sniping, close quarter battles, jets, drones, tanks, launchers, designators - this game ahas its all and much more than that From the downside the learning curve is pretty...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
Arma 3 scores 83/100 on the BANG Score (worth it). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/107410/arma-3The BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 10, price as of Sep 22.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.