"Prairie Fire" - new SOG/Mike Force DLC for ARMA 3

A couple of years ago some peeps made a Vietnam mod for ARMA 3, and have now taken it farther with an Official DLC that was released just last week:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1227700/Arma_3_Creator_DLC_SOG_Prairie_Fire/

You do need ARMA 3 to play it.

Since I am a Nam-head I picked it up and played a bit over the weekend with friends. It's not bad! You play coop as Americans vs the VC in an interesting truncated map of Vietnam. And I do mean truncated. You can drive from Saigon to Hue in like 5 minutes (if you survive). There is some wonkiness since it is all ARMA mechanics and not a ground-up Vietnam game, and several times I accidentally placed a claymore while trying to interact with another player. Oops!
It is still lacking ACAVs and M-48s, but there are guntrucks with 3x .50cals, one with a minigun, and a quad .50. Also M-41s, several flavor of gunships (there are C- model hogs, frogs and ARA, and UH-1P with minigun door stations), Loach, UH-34Ds in both USMC style (eyes on the nose and a single m-60) and King Bees with 2x .30cals and F-4c with napalm!

I had a good time! One memorable mission started with hitting an LZ outside of Can Tho to blast some AA sites. We started catching VC mortars and a gunship spotted it but was hit before they could engage, so our squad humper over there. I had just started out so only had access to basic stuff, but was smart enough to bring 16 mags for my M-16 and 2x 2L canteens and 4x LRRP rations. It paid dividends because first I got bit by a snake (which sucked and took 1x food and 2 whole liters of water to cure) then our little 8 man squad hit a platoon of VC coming to relieve the AA site. It was a mad firefight as night fell, and at one point there were only 4 of us left, all clustered around this weird rock formation with the VC yelling from all around. It was TENSE! Then, a crazy helo pilot did a flare run over us, the illum revealing that they were right on top of us at point blank. Utter chaos!!! The VC broke with only myself and my buddy still up, and we were able to revive 2 other guys before we were reinforced. Took out the mortar site then moved into a small outpost in Can Tho when the VC counter attacked. We were lucky in that someone had built up the outpost a little (which is really cool that you can build) and had put a 60mm mortar in and a dude made sure we had flares overhead at all times. The counter attack was wild! RPGs came in from all over the place and there was a lot of RPD fire. A CH-34 was disabled while dropping off more troops, block out field of fire in one direction. We probably lost 12 or 14 guys during that defense. The most surreal moment was this Huey driver just hovering over the downed CH-34, connecting a line to it, then lifting it out out, all while RPGs are flying past it, tracers were flying through it, and mortars were hitting all around! I kept having to scavenge ammo from our casualties and bandages from dead VC. Our bacon was saved when an F-4 dropped napalm on a VC group, breaking them. At the end there was 3 of us and I was using an SKS and only had 2 stripper clips left for it. As was typical for Nam, the area went "Green" (showed as mission complete, area pacified) and a helo came in to take us back to Pleiku to rearm. For an area that was pacified, we sure took a lot of fire on our way out! Looked at my stats on the flight and I was downed 3 times (and revived), had 0 deaths, and 109 kills!
After that, we raided Haiphong!

There is a ton of customization you can do. Uniforms, backpack types, head gear, vests/load bearing gear, etc etc. And the weapons.... oooo boy. So far I have access to several types of M-16, XM-177s, XM 148 GLS, M-79s, M1s, M2a, M3 carbine (it's and M-2 but with NV scope), Swedish Ks, M3 Grease Guns, M-60s and RPDs (including chopped versions), Mat-49s, AKs, and a ton of other stuff, most of which you can put various stuff onto. My buddy Zak used a Sten with silencer for most of the action.

It is obvious that the makers have done a lot of research, and even have both voice and written stuff by a couple of SOG guys (including my friend John "Tilt" Stryker-Meyer). To my great surprise the even have Ho Ngoc Tao, where my dad was based with B-56/SIGMA/CCS, on their map between Saigon and Cu Chi, right where it should be.

Anywho, if you're into FPS type games, I recommend it. Let me know if you pick it up and we can play together!

I've been playing this again with a couple of friends. Mostly been sticking to very low population servers to avoid some the shitshow stuff that we've seen, so very different tactics. We tend to go out to a contested zone and setup a little FSB with a 60m or 81mm mortar then go out individually or in a small group to find the targets, plaster them with HE and WP then head back to the FSB for the counter attacks. Not very realistic but still a hoot. Let me know if anyone wants to give it a swing.

This looks like fun - I recently posted a Youtube clip of a game that looks like this one.