
The longer your MACV recon squad stays in one place fighting VC, the more reinforcements make their way into the area. Keep it tight: These are the best tactical shooters around Much more than in other Arma PvE I’ve played, engagements in SOG Prairie Fire put me on a knife’s edge of tension between needing to clear an area of hostile forces, and worrying about getting bogged down under increasingly terrible odds. Missions range from planting booby-trapped ammo boxes on PAVN trucks to rescuing captured pilots held in tunnel networks, and you’ll constantly feel pressure from LZ spotters and trackers, who will be hunting your squad from the moment you swing your mesh jungle boots off the chopper’s deck and hit the dusty ground. You’ll start at a FOB, draw equipment from the S-4 shack, and hop on a Kingbee transport helicopter for a ride to the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The missions take care to convey the scale of recon ops in the Vietnam jungle. Using the new quick-play menu in Prairie Fire’s custom front end, you can easily drop right into a server running one of these missions, as one of up to 14 members of a team.

Missions convey the scale of recon ops in the Vietnam jungle SOG Prairie Fire includes an all-new 300-square-kilometre map called Cam Lao Nam, where you’ll run missions out of six forward operating bases connected to the Pleiku US Air Force base. Running through the back-of-the-box stats provides a decent sense of the scope of this expansion. It’s just a shame that it leaves solo Arma 3 players out in the cold. It’s also an instant contender for a slot on our list of the best Vietnam War games, adding a frankly staggering amount of new thematic content to Arma 3’s sandbox toolkit. SOG Prairie Fire is the latest piece of ‘creator DLC’ for Arma 3, the line of add-on packs developed by external studios, and published by Bohemia Interactive. But it’s that very shabbiness that somehow sells the approach into Pleiku Air Base, located in the II Corps Tactical Zone in South Vietnam. Now that I’ve had time to soak in the ray-traced sunbeams and shadows of Metro Exodus, the flat textures and low-polygon models of Bohemia’s military simulation sandbox can feel a bit like sitting amongst so many cardboard boxes.

Arma 3 is showing its age now, coming up on eight years since its initial release.
