Bohemia Interactive is ready to have a great 2013. DayZ and ArmA 3 are due to release sometime in the next twelve months and both titles have rabid fans anticipating them. The studio’s also planning to branch out beyond its hardcore simulation games too. Bohemia announced ArmA Tactics on Wednesday, a new turn-based strategy game due out this year.
Described as a “turn-based close combat strategy game,” ArmA Tactics lets you control a four-person Special Forces squad in battle fields akin to those in the main ArmA series, though you’ll see your characters rather than play from the first-person perspective. There’s a story-based campaign, but Bohemia says that there will also be randomly generated missions as well. On the surface, it sounds much like an ArmA take on XCOM: Enemy Unknown.
Bohemia isn’t a total stranger to the genre. The studio helped Black Element Software develop and release a remake of Carrier Command, a remake of the 1988 real-time strategy game, just last year. This is the first time the ArmA name has been put on a whole new genre.
The more unusual part of Bohemia’s announcement is that ArmA Tactics will be available for Project Shield, the portable, Google Android-based gaming machine from Nvidia. Both the game and the device are due out some time between April and July, making ArmA Tactics one of the machine’s very first games.
2012 was one of Bohemia Interactive’s best years and one of its worst years. On the one hand, its military simulator ArmA 2 saw what the studio said was a 500-percent increase in sales thanks to the runaway success of Dean Hall’s zombie apocalypse mod DayZ. It was so successful that Bohemia decided to make the mod into an official standalone title that would be out by the end of 2012, shipping alongside ArmA 3. Then both games were delayed to an unspecified date in 2013. That was on top of two of the arrest of two Bohemia developers charged with espionage in Greece.
The developers, Ivan Buchta and Martin Pezlar have been released though, and DayZ is progressing with a plethora of new content. This year looks like it will be markedly better than the last for Bohemia Interactive.
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