Bohemia Interactive wants to bring its trademark military tactics to your pocket.
Many genres have adapted well to touch-based mobile interfaces in recent years. Unfortunately, hardcore first-person military simulation is one genre that may be better left to PC. That hasn’t stopped ArmA developer Bohemia Interactive from branching out into the handheld market with their newly announced Arma Tactics, which ditches the series’ signature ultra-realism in favor of turn-based close combat tactics.
Arma Tactics will follow a four-member team of Special Forces in a nonlinear “open-world storyline.” Players will face enemies ranging from unskilled militias to trained mercenaries in a series of story-based missions, though the game will also include randomly-generated missions with varied objectives. The gameplay itself, inspired by classic turn-based tactics games like X-COM and Jagged Alliance, will rely on strategic use of advanced weapons and skills to subdue the opposing forces.
At launch, the game will be exclusive to NVIDIA’s upcoming handheld devices: the NVIDIA Tegra 4 tablet and Project SHIELD, an Android-based portable gaming system. Ports to other platforms are on the to-do list, though Bohemia is currently pretty enamored with NVIDIA hardware. “At the heart of the console, Tegra 4 SoC has 72 GPU cores and 4 CPU cores and its raw computing power easily surpasses many current notebooks,” says a post on Bohemia Interactive’s site. “[It] provides hours of gameplay on batteries because of its energy efficiency; truly portable gaming comparable to current gen desktop consoles! This is, in our opinion, clear proof that mobile games are no longer simple puzzles, many of them challenge desktop console quality projects and can allocate budget for full body motion capturing.”
Arma Tactics will deploy to NVIDIA platforms sometime in Q2 2013, with ports to iOS, Android, PC, MAC, and Linux potentially coming in Q3. There are currently no announcements regarding any turn-based zombie mods, but we’ll keep you posted.
