Arma 2: Operation Arrowhead
Fair · Shooter · 2010
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
WAIT.
A BANGER at $7.40, only fair at $19.99.
- Length
- 8.4h
- Value
- $2.38/hr
- Reviews
- 92% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 1 GB of memory, 10 GB of storage. Windows only.
Three years after the conflict in Chernarus, portrayed in the original Arma 2, a new flashpoint explodes in the Green Sea Region. Coalition forces led by the US Army are deployed to Takistan to quickly restore peace and prevent further civilian casualties.
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
The lowest price on record is $2.99, set in June 2015. It has been discounted 107 times in the 14 years tracked here, typically at 80 percent off, with about 5 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 4 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 5 weeks. Past sales have already crossed the $7.40 BANGER line 103 times.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 16 percent on value. It is pricier than 80 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 90 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Arma 3 ($29.99, scores 83) beats it on value, while it beats Arma: Cold War Assault Remastered ($9.99, scores 60).
73 from critics against 92 percent from players, and the player number comes from people who own the game.
This site sampled 525 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 9 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written March 2020 to September 2026. That is more refunded reviewers than 7 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 725 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 146 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 68 percent of the 1,552 reviews written there were positive, against 92 percent overall, and those are 10 percent of everything written about it.
8.4 hours to finish it, 23 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 2.8 times the campaign.
Players
113 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
Compared to Arma 3, perhaps the biggest downside of this game is that it does not have nearly as many mods, yet I still love it and regard it as my introduction to military-themed games.
Best arma game in the series, accomplishes the early 2000's war feeling perfectly.
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.
No data upstream: achievement curve (Steam global achievements).
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
Arma 2: Operation Arrowhead scores 67/100 on the BANG Score (fair value). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/33930/arma-2-operation-arrowheadThe 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 11, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.