Cheap clone of GRAW (literally the same engine) with no improvements whatsoever.
I'm going to be honest. I could hardly play America's Army. In fact, I didn't get to really play the online multiplayer much at all. Not that I didn't want to. I just couldn't because the game wouldn't let me.
The training for the game is like the other stuff you see in America's Army games, y'know, meant to be like real Army training rather than just "here's how to play the game".
The game follows up training with Wargames. Rather than having a legitimate campaign, they decided to go with some crap where the player and a couple of AI buddies march around and complete objectives against AI who sit down upon being shot. It's meant to be like a wargame, which is basically practice, exercise, staying frosty, whatever you want to call it, in which nobody dies and everyone is isn't trying to kill eachother, kind of like a game of paintball. That's plenty cool, but a real single player campaign would've been much nicer. "Rise of a Soldier" had a much better campaign layout in that there was training, and then there were actual missions in which the player was, from an in-game realism point of view, in real danger against real enemies rather than fellow soldiers dressed up as enemies.
When I played, I couldn't remember seeing any competitive multiplayer modes. This is fine with me, since I never play any player-versus-player modes in GRAW. However, for whatever stupid reason, now only two players can play on a single console, instead of four like in GRAW and GRAW 2.
The game has utterly broken player movement. The game forces the player to a first-person view for whatever reason, and unlike the FPS view in the Ghost Recon games, this FPS view actually lets the player see his own hands and weapons. That would be cool and all, except that the game still controls just like GRAW (if not even worse) so that the act of trying to move around feels like total crap as the player just slides around and shakes wildly and moves in a really odd fashion. This movement is annoying any way you cut it, but would have been far better-suited to a third-person view, which would already be programmed into the game since this is just a GRAW mod. Being a clone of GRAW explains why moving around feels like crap, but it doesn't explain why they didn't just FREAKING FIX IT, or at least keep the third-person view.
The button placement also sucks. Have they never played a real FPS before? Could they not make the controller configuration more sensible?
The biggest problem that they just refused to fix was late-joining. When late-joining, players are forced to stare at the player list while everyone else plays the game, and they can't actually see anything until the game is over. However, if the player joins on time and dies, he can spectate through the eyes of the other players, which is interesting and leaves something to look forward to when the player comes back to life to rejoin the battle. The only reason I could possibly imagine for having to look at the player list when joining late is so people can't cheat in PvP battles, but who really gives a crap what crappy reason they could possibly have, FORCING LATE JOINERS TO LOOK AT THE PLAYER LIST INSTEAD OF SPECTATING THE GAME IS OBVIOUSLY THE MOST STUPID DECISION THEY COULD'VE EVER MADE FOR THE ENTIRE GAME OR ANY OTHER GAME EVER.
I could not play the multiplayer. I couldn't. I would join a game, the game would start, then after a few seconds I would be kicked out. This happened every time in the demo and it happened every time in the full version. It wouldn't let me play multiplayer! THE GAME IS LIKE MULTIPLAYER-ONLY.
The only, ONLY thing that looked better about the multiplayer compared to GRAW that I could actually catch was when I saw a player name floating above an APC. I highly doubt that the player was driving it, since GRAW has no vehicular control and a crappy game like True Soldiers sure as hell wouldn't bother to program it in. More likely, that player had control over whether the APC would move forward, move backward, or stop. Even though that's kind of lame how the APCs in GRAW just move on a set path, it's still a step above GRAW multiplayer which had no vehicles, except for enemies who would use vehicles at scripted moments (or send out helicopters).
The player models look like they were ripped right out of GRAW, which they probably were.
The game just adds nothing over GRAW or GRAW 2. In fact, thanks to a lifeless single player, crappy controls & movement, and clear evidence that they didn't give a crap about the game, even if the multiplayer was playable, the game would STILL be unplayable!
Because the game adds absolutely no improvements whatsoever over GRAW 2, there's just nothing making it worth any money.