America's Army

"A great free game with some glaring flaws"

America's Army is a free multiplayer first person shooter made by the U.S. government as a recruitment tool. Since it is made by the military, it tries to incorporate realism into the game. This is a very good concept; realistic shooters are welcome and needed. However, too much realism can be a bad thing; the Army has attempted to make the game into such a realistic game that some elements of its game play can take the fun out of it. However, overall, it is a very solid game, and best of all, it is free!

Graphics- 9/10

The graphics are rather detailed. While the game is not on par with brand new games like those on the Xbox 360, they are far better than anything on consoles such as the PS2. Part of the reason the graphics are not outstanding is because the Army instead thought that massive levels was a good game play element to add, and in my opinion, sacrificing some detail for better-made levels is a worthy trade off.

Audio - 7/10

The audio of the game is very good, and as normal, plays an integral parts in finding out where people are. However, while gunshots are good, explosions sound a bit weak.

Controls - 7/10

Overall, the controls are more or less the same as other first person shooters. However, to an extent I find them to be buggy and overcomplicated. America's Army tends to have a problem with incorporating too much realism into the game. Thus, every button on the keyboard serves some sort of function. This includes pointless functions that do not need to be in the game such as fastening a seat belt when driving a car or unjamming your gun. The controls themselves also appear to be a little buggy, but this does not hinder the game play too much once you get used to them. Some of these "bugs" again result from the fact that the Army wanted to incorporate "realism" into their game. For example, if you try to snipe, but are too close to an object, you will zoom out because in real life, you cannot aim your rifle through the body of a car or something. This limits a player's strategy in a tight situation.

Game Play - 7/10

The actual performance of the game is rather good. The game is an extremely tactical shooter. It is a lot like Counter-Strike, but far more realistic. One side normally tries to complete an objective while the other side tries to defend. Overall, it works pretty well. The game incorporates realistic elements such as leaning and going prone for better stability when shooting. Before starting, one chooses a class. You can be a rifleman and use the standard M16, a machine gunner who uses the M249, or a sniper, who uses either the M24 or Barrett M82. In order to keep game balance, both sides use the same weapons, although if you pick up an enemy weapon, it magically becomes a Russian gun like an AK47. While the game itself is quite good, there are some flaws in it:

First of all, you need to complete training missions to even play the game. While unlocking the basic levels and functions is not that hard, the whole concept of being forced to complete missions just to play the game is tedious and annoying. Some missions are also incredibly boring. The prime examples of this are the medic classes. In order to play as a medic in this game, players need to sit through actual classes in a virtual classroom and then take a virtual test on what you learned. During all of this, the game tries to incorporate extreme realism to the point where players need to press buttons to physically flip through the pages of the test. However, in practice, the classes are merely realistically boring. Moreover, to unlock many of the more advanced multiplayer missions, players do need to engage in extremely difficult training missions such as the infamous "Escape and Evade", which has cause frustration to many players. Ultimately, I think that the idea behind including training missions is fundamentally good. It gets people acquainted with the game and its dynamics. My whole issue is the fact that the game requires players to spend hours going through training just to have access to the whole game.

The second major flaw of America's Army is the extremely stringent friendly fire system. In game, there is little distinction between friends and foes, except that perhaps the enemy forces carry Russian weapons and look a little more like terrorists or Russians. While many bad guys feature differently colored uniforms from your teammates, this is not always the case. Sometimes, the only distinction between a friend and a foe is a black ski mask instead of a white one, which is honestly not good enough, since some teammates also wear black hats. At long range, when all you can see is outlines, it can be hard to tell whether someone is friend or foe. Moreover, many levels are very dark and it can be hard to distinguish who is who since it is hard to see. Despite the fact that players can sometimes barely tell who is on what side half the time, the game magically expects them to know 100% and if they get it wrong, they either a) get shot if they think an enemy is a friend or b) lose like 200 points for shooting a teammate. This would not be that bad except a player's honor level (which is similar to rank) suffers if he or she scores negative points.

This brings us to the third major flaw of the game: the honor system. Honor is basically the equivalent of "rank", which is used in many army games. While getting points can make one's honor go up, losing them due to accidental team killings make it go down. Players start out at 10 honor, and most servers require at least 10 to play. On my first game, I learned about the harsh friendly fire rules the hard way and lost like 400 points. I was kicked from the server, sent to the game's virtual prison (yes, this game sends players to virtual prison cells if they kill too many friendlies) and then found myself with 9 honor. However, since most servers require at least 10 honor to play on them, I was out of luck finding games to play. Only like 10% of the servers were accessible at 9 honor, and if I lost more, my selection of servers would have gotten even smaller. In order to access most of the servers again, I had to score enough points in the few servers I could play on to earn back my tenth honor point.

Another major annoyance that is worth mentioning is this game's a downloading client. America's Army has recently tried to make everyone download the game using its downloader, known as the "deploy client." This is supposed to be an application which makes downloading the game quick and efficient. However, in my experience, it actually has the opposite effect. Instead of making the downloading process easier and more efficient, it makes it more difficult, slower, and more annoying than ever. Also, the Army is now trying to make everyone use this downloader and stopped releasing stand-alone patches. The full game takes around seven hours to download itself with my connection (768kb/s DSL), and this client is not making such a long download any easier. I've actually seen this client download in bytes per second as opposed to kilobytes (and I normally get around 90 kb/s download speed).

Although I am sound like I am just bashing the game, I am just pointing out the flaws with it. Other than what I mentioned above, it is a pretty solid game. The actual game play is rather fluid and lacks bugs overall. Weapon dynamics are all right, and the movement mechanics are not that bad at all. They can be twitchy as I mentioned in the controls section, but they are more than playable and most "bugs" are really intentional and added for realism. The game is also rather balanced and does not really suffer from any overpowered weapons or anything (except perhaps the M203, which in the right hands can kill people from across the map). There is absolutely nothing wrong with the way the game plays out in itself; realistic, round-based combat is very interesting and in this case, it works perfectly.

Fun Factor: 7/10

I have conflicting opinions regarding how fun this game is. On the one hand, I have to give the Army credit for making a competent game with decent game dynamics and a lack of hackers which are elements that a lot of free games fail to offer. It is not every day that someone releases a high quality free shooter that can actually compete with games people pay for. The core game play is very fun and has a lot of potential. As I mentioned above, the game itself is executed flawlessly.

However, the Army's excessive attempts at "realism" kind of ruin the game at the same time. There is realism, and then there is overkill. Adding many realistic elements to a game is not bad; it is a welcome change of pace. However, games are supposed to be fun, and going overboard with such realism ruins the fun. Going through excessive training just to access parts of the game is not fun and losing a ton of points due to friendly fire accidents is just frustrating.

Finally, the extremely difficult learning curve could deter new players from having fun in this game. Even skilled players in other games will die a lot when playing this one. Repeatedly getting like 1 kill per 10 deaths is not going to encourage people to play this game. While I would not expect to be an excellent player walking into such a game, getting owned that bad gets boring after a while. The game being round-based does not help either in this respect because new players will often be sitting on the side lines a lot more than actually playing the game.

Replay Value: 8/10

There is a fairly good selection of maps in this game. However, many of them need extra training to unlock. Moreover, many are not played on most servers. Expect to play the same five or six levels over and over again.

Learning Curve / Difficulty: 2/10

This has to seriously be the most difficult game I have ever played. While I am by no means good at most first person shooters, this game is so difficult that it is rather easy for players to want to give up. The mandatory training does nothing to improve players' skills in this game either. After years of playing, the regular players know every map and every strategy on it. They will know what move you will make before you do and kill you accordingly. As a matter of fact, a friend of mine who plays this actually showed me all kinds of tricks that result in cheap kills. For example, aiming a grenade launcher at a certain column at a certain place will cause a grenade to hit likely camping spots all the way on the other side of the map. Since newbies will most likely occupy such spots, they are easy targets for such cheap kills. This game just is not newbie friendly and is very predictable for extremely experienced players.

Overall: 7/10

Overall, America's Army is in theory an excellent game. It features solid game play, good graphics, a large community, and few hackers. As a matter of fact, for a free game, it is so good that I would argue that it can compete with many games that people pay for (in my opinion it blows similar games of this nature like Counter Strike away). Its core game play is very solid and fun. However, since the game was made as a recruitment tool by the U.S. Army, the military has tried to make it as realistic as possible. Realism is good in theory, but the Army went overboard with the whole realism factor, which basically ruined the game. Required training and severe penalties for friendly fire may be facts of life in the real U.S. Army, but they are not good elements to include in a game. This game can also be hard for newbies to get into because of its insane learning curve.

Despite these shortcomings, I would still recommend this game to people looking for a good, realistic, tactical, multiplayer shooter. I will say again, while I may sound negative in this review a lot of the time, this game is not bad by any means. It is a solid free game and the only thing downloading it will cost you is your time. Even though it features some glaring flaws, it can still be a fun game.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 02/23/09, Updated 06/04/09

Game Release: America's Army (US, 08/28/02)