You too can be an army of one...but...um...only in the virtual world.
User Rating: 7.7 | America's Army PC
It’s almost not even worth writing this review for America’s Army because who needs to read a review on a game when they can just go download the thing for free. But here goes… So if you don’t already know, the game America’s Army is a recruitment tool made by the Army to get more brain dead teenagers educated on how the army works and get them interested in joining up. It is pretty successful too, at least as far as educating teens about the army. The game puts you through the paces of going to (a weak sauce version of) boot camp and weapons familiarization. Actually I think the idea is very original and works well. You earn/lose points depending on how well you play and there's a website that keeps track of them. Also by doing different types of training you can qualify for different ranks like Sniper, Special Forces, Army Rangers, Medic etc. Not bad. Also my favorite thing about AA would have to be the weapons. The weapons in AA are very well done because the Army tried to make them as realistic as possible. The best way to show this is by pointing out the sound of the guns (loud and powerful) and the blast radius of the grenades. The guns sound just like their real-life counterparts and the grenades have a kill radius larger than 5 feet (so it’s actually a useful weapon). Luckily it wasn’t that hard for AA since the developers probably had a closet full of them down the hall to examine. Now let me talk about the less attractive points of the game. One complaint I have with the game is that it’s easily plagued by network problems. One guy with a bad ping can really kill it for everyone. During a laggy game you can seriously fire a bullet from your gun and have it NOT hit something for second or more. Hard to kill anyone like that. Make sure to pick games with low ping rates (around 100-150 ms). That will help to make sure you hit what you're aiming at. Another thing that bothers me is that people are overly critical of how you play. Since there is no respawn until the start of the next match people really, really don’t like to die. All dead players are forced to watch the rest of the match via third-person. Since you can’t turn off friendly fire, it’s really easy for trigger happy noobies to kill a teammate too. So the key to playing is to work as a team and be careful where you shoot and throw grenades. If you don’t, be prepared to get cussed out by somebody and maybe even kicked. Lastly there is a lot of cheating with this game (people really wanting to be an army of one I guess) so make sure you only play on games that use Punkbuster. Otherwise play at your own risk (and get owned). So despite the aforementioned problems this game is still worth a try. The whole point that it is free should set your expectations low enough to allow this game to please you. If not you can delete it without worries of your wife giving you the “don’t waste money on video games you don’t play” speech again. Read my words…and remember.
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