Americas Army: A game that is very difficult, but is addictive and lasts forever.
To get this game, you only need to go to the americas army official website and download it through one of the mirrors. You install it and you're ready, or well...ready for some good training.
Because before you go out and mess-up a bunch of random terrorists, you have to go through a pretty tough training. There's a number of training sessions, varying from Basics to Sniper training, to Medic training and a very challenging Special Forces training, and more. You can already begin playing the game after completing Basic training, however you won't be able to select sniping weapons, wont be able to join Special Forces maps, and you wont be able to heal your buddies ingame and some more things.
The training is to help you get used to some of the realistic ingame aspects like, weapons jamming and things like when you get your ironsights up, you need to focus on your breathing, in order to aim accurately.
However once you are done with this, and you can go play online, a whole new "world" opens up. As a new player it will be difficult to get used to the game. Getting used to controls is not what decides the "real" learning curve here. Actually, the learning curve even manages to seperate players that have played the game for 3 years from the ones that "only" played 2 years.
This learning curve is decided by the very clever map structures, the difficulty of aiming, how predictable you will move around a map, and obviously the teamwork.
You can't avoid being shot time after time after time in the beginning, you can't avoid being called a noob (term for new player). It's a game of patience for the new. Once you get experience you can try and kill enemies.
Experience in the game is also shown. Where you have Medals and Ranks in BF2, you have a point system in Americas Army called Honor. It goes from 1 to 100. It can go down if you kill team members, and it goes up if you do objectives, kill enemies etc etc. You start out with 10, but don't think you can get into the game and when you're pissed off, kill some teammates for the fun of it. Once you get below 10 honor, alot of server won't be accesible anymore, because of the teamkilling reason. It requires Special Forces training and 15 honor to play on the Special Forces maps too.
Graphics are nothing special, they do the job, that's about it.
Sound might not seem good in the beginning, however you will learn that sound is one of the key aspects in knowing where the enemy is. Yes, it's the reason why the enemy always knows where you are, it's sound, not some stupid radar hack or anything. But if you buy a decent headphone you will get a huge advantage over others as well. All in all, graphics and sounds aren't the things to enjoy, they're the things to use. As you progress in the game, you'll find out there's a huge community backing the game up. You will get experienced and you will see the challenge in getting up honor.
This way the game lasts a good year or more for the ones that enjoy it, for free. There are players that have playing 1 particular map only for over a year, just to prove how challenging one map can be. Nevermind 39.
A great game in my opinion. But a game for patience, and a game for the people that like a real challenge.