April Fools’ day’s carousel of nonsense hasn’t been slowed by its head-on collision with Easter this year, with multiple spoof announcements from the games industry leaking through Monday’s chocolatey outer shell. One particularly elaborate gag has captured the imagination of the ArmA Reforger community, with developer Bohemia Interactive surprise “announcing” a new game mode where everyone plays as toy soldiers.
Titled, ‘Tiny Wars’, the alleged update switches out Reforger’s realistic landscapes and authentic Cold War setting for a diminutive conflict between red and green plastic troops. The trailer, which you can view above, shows the two toy sides waging polyethylenic war across a military office space, clambering over a mountainous jumble of green army crates, crossing bridges made out of ring-bound notepads, and establishing defences in a fort made out of Duplo-style building bricks.
“Tiny Wars is a testament to our commitment to innovation and creativity,” declares Bohemia Interactive in a Steam post. “Never before has any gaming franchise so effectively paired military simulator gameplay with meticulously recreated retro miniatures.” According to Bohemia, the update’s key features include “whimsical environments” and “no choking hazard”, with Tiny Wars purportedly offering “All of the immersive warfare of years past with none of the pesky plastic danger.”
Clearly, it’s a daft bit of fun. But there are an awful lot of responses wishing that it wasn’t. “If not just a joke, this could be one of the best things they could have added to reforger,” writes YouTube user asphaltape. “April fool’s aside, please publish this to the main game, everyone wants this!” Similar replies are scrawled underneath the trailer on YouTube and in the comments to Bohemia’s Steam announcement.
That said, not everyone is thrilled. “Are we actually making jokes about good ideas and content?” says Steam user JonBax. He does have a point. Reforger hasn’t been the most well-received entry in the ArmA series. Designed and released as a “bridge” to ArmA 4, the game centres mainly around a Zeus-style roleplaying toolset for creating military scenarios on the fly with other players, with a barebones offering of authored content. This, combined with a fairly slow sequence of updates, resulted in the game landing with a mixed reception on Steam. Little wonder, then, that Bohemia’s April Fools’ gag has caused such a stir.