Genre: First-Person Shooter
Developer: The U.S. Army
Publisher: The U.S. Army
# of Players: 1-32
Memory: 600+ Megabyte Download, and growing with each update.
Website: www.americasarmy.com
Pre-note: Due to excessive boredom from me losing my internet connection for a while, this review will double as a miniature FAQ.
Introduction:
"Frag out!"
Welcome to America’s Army. A first-person shooter devised by the Army themselves. Discipline yourself to the pinnacle of devotion to your squad, because almost always, you will not win without them there to back up your every move. The setting is modern day Earth, no specific country or place. You take the role of an American soldier in foreign territory, your missions are quite clear. Depending on the mission you select, you will embark on a mission, typically ten minutes in length if not completed. Your missions range from gaining valuable enemy data from a computer, to safely crossing a bridge. The only problem is, there’s always another squad there to protect such objectives. Do you have the skill, patience and wits to outshoot and outsmart your enemy? Or are you nothing more than a big talker?
Presentation:
Find out. In the America’s Army game, accomplish your objectives for the big points, or take the sometimes quicker, yet more dangerous route of eliminating all enemies. Sounds simple enough, right? You’d think so, but this ain’t no Socom. Virtually every move you make may be putting your and your squad in danger, for America’s Army is basically an online-only game, meaning the same tactic won’t work over and over again, there aren’t any optional bots here ala games like Battlefield 1942 or Unreal Tournament (Although great games, also, don’t get me wrong.) It’s all human, and it’s all about you. Choose from a small arsenal of weapons, ranging from the M16 Assault Rifle to the M82 Sniper Rifle. Take the role of a part of the team, be a medic, which is for anyone aside from the Squad Leader and Sniper(S). Or how about a Grenadier, using the M203 Assault Rifle/Grenade Launcher combination? There are more, but you want to hear about the game. Not some meaningless rambling.
Well, the game is absolutely free, and available at www.americasarmy.com as well as other websites for download. Make an account, finish basic training and you’re set. Once in-game, after making all necessary adjustments, find a server, any server, but make sure the ping is good, don’t need more people saying lag killed them now, there’s a plethora of servers, ranging over every mission and level, and some with custom settings such as sniper-only servers hosted by individuals convinced no one can sharp shoot better than them to servers with no-objective rules, where you have to eliminate the enemy forces, or you’ll be kicked by an administrator. While such servers exist few and far between, and are hosted by players, it still makes for an exceptionally splendid twist from the normal rules.
Now, you may be wondering how the game itself is, the commentary from a few readers at this moment may still be "Eww, a free first-person shooter, let me guess, it’s based in Java form and is a top-down shooter!" Well, you’d be wrong with such comments. For you see, America’s Army is a full-fledged Online First Person Shooter, with pretty advanced graphics with tons of texture detail and is about 670 megabytes or so in size to download, possibly more now. You have all the controls you need, run, jump, walk, crawl (Prone), and much more, I will list the most important controls below, for sake of public knowledge! And for the fact that you will need them, and yet may not know about them for a while after partaking in the game if you don’t know them.
General Tips:
Movement:
Walk - You will move slower, but will make less noise, also you will not yell "Frag out!" when throwing a Frag Grenade. Also for use in prone and crouch modes, you will be able to move in all three modes with your scope or binoculars up, very useful for snipers.
Run - You will move much faster, double tap your forward button to get a burst of speed even faster than run. While in this sprint, you will not be able to use any weapons. While in normal run mode, you will not be able to move with your scope/binoculars up, will shout "Frag out!" when throwing a Frag Grenade and will make more noise when moving. Excellent for assaulting teams that must keep forcing ground and keeping safe from snipers.
Crouch - In this mode you will aim more accurately, and will be a smaller target, but will become more vulnerable to snipers due to a slower moving speed, especially vulnerable if in walk mode.
Prone - Typically for sniping or long range barrages, you will aim extremely accurate in this mode, but will be virtually sitting ducks for snipers and M203 Grenade Rounds. Bring up your scope in this mode and you’ll be deadly, but watch where you move, enemy soldiers lurk around every bullet pocked corner. While in walk mode in this position, you’ll aim accurately and be able to move at the same time, extremely useful for ducking sniper fire while protecting assaulting squad members.
Attacking:
Scope - Bringing up your scope improves accurately slightly no matter where you’re at or what gun you’re using, you see less of the screen, but have a better shot.
Firing and Alternative Fire - While shooting a typical M16 Assault Rifle, you’ll normally go prone and use your small scope-like target to pick off an enemy from a distance, or go into a close range brawl, typically around corners trying to use wit and knowledge of the area to outsmart and gain an advantage over the enemy by sneaking up behind him. Hitting the alternative fire button will switch you from single fire mode to burst mode, where each shot fires 3 bullets, inaccurate, but good for extremely close range battles. For the sniper rifle, it may bring up your scope. With automatic machine guns such as the M249 S-Automatic Weapon (Also known as simply "saw" or "249.") there is no alternative fire, but for the enemy version of the saw, a modified AK47 basically, you can switch from single to automatic mode, the enemy version holds less, and is more inaccurate, but is excellent for close range--- be warned though, teammates may think the enemy is firing upon them if you don’t let them know you’re using an enemy weapon as the tracers are green instead of orange. Also, by using the alternate fire button after equipping a grenade and holding down the fire button, you will "cook," the grenade, essentially setting off an internal fuse, you’ll be holding a live grenade, only do this with flash bangs if you plan to throw it immediately after hitting alternate fire, if not it will blow up in your hand. Great if you can get the timing down for Frag Grenades, as you can have it explode above someone’s head.
Binoculars - If you’re attacking from a range, and are not a sniper, you may help the sniper(s) find targets by using your binoculars and reporting any enemy sighting(s) to them, also good if you need to advance and aren’t sure if enemies are around planning an ambush.
Night Vision Goggles - While only available on certain levels, mainly darker ones, Night Vision Goggles provide the added benefit of being able to see in the dark, they’re simple to use and may be unequipped quickly in a more lighted situation. Be aware, in this mode you’re highly vulnerable to Flash Bang-Grenades blinding you.
Supported Mode - While guns like the M16 have no supported mode, the U.S. Sniper Rifles all have bi-pods that will greatly increase aim. To use the bi-pod, you must switch to prone mode and then hit the supported fire button. The M249 also has a bi-pod for added fire accuracy. The downside of using the bi-pod is that it takes about 2 seconds to set up and put away. While standing up and running away is simple when getting up, standing up and fighting back in extremely critical situations is delayed by the bi-pod adjustments. Setting up the bi-pod leaves you wide open to any fire, while especially vulnerable to sniper fire. Pressing this button while standing, crouching, or prone with the M203 Grenade Launcher (Or 203 for short, no one calls it the Grenade Launcher.) will switch you to the grenade launching mode, where you won’t be able to bring up any sights to aim with and the crosshair is slightly off, so you must get accustomed to using it over time. And of course, the grenade will not become armed if launched too close to something, it needs to be in the air for about .81 seconds or so before it’ll explode, meaning close range attacks against uninjured enemies are better left to your single fire assault rifle mode. Don’t be fooled though, if you can hit your enemy with a launched grenade it will still damage them. It is, after all, a high speed launched grenade.
Grenades - You have three types of grenades, the M84 Frag Grenade, your typical Smoke Grenade, and the classic Flash Bang-Grenade. Flash Bangs are typically referred to as just flashes. If they explode close to you, they will almost always deafen you. You will hear a loud piercing ring for a few moments, and if they hit anywhere within your sight of vision at a close range, you will be blinded for an amount of time determined by the distance and how close it was to where your pupils would be fixed onto it, you will see nothing but white that slowly fades back into the normal image, if you get blinded and deafened, you’re virtually useless until it wears off, but if you’re fairly certain which way the enemy force(s) may be, fire at will, best to go down fighting than to just sit there, but if teammates may be there, don’t fire, not worth the risk of tearing through squad members in an effort to keep yourself alive. Note: Flash Bangs still do damage, but not as much as any other weapon, a very small amount, but is still enough to kill a highly damaged soldier, so if you’re in the red, watch out. Frag Grenades do a radial upward blast effect, meaning if one lands near you, your best bet is to go prone, and face legs-toward the grenade. Luck is also a factor, as the blast radius is random, so while it’ll always get anyone standing close by with flak, it also has a chance of hitting you if you’re lying down. Grenades won’t always kill you, but they do the most severe damage, so see a medic quick. They also deafen like Flash Bang-Grenades, but no blinding effect. Get around a corner and get down, cause Frag grenades are deadly, remember, being lower then the actually grenade will almost always protect you from taking any damage, so if it lands on a table, slope or ledge, get lower than the grenade. Smoke Grenades are just that, grenades that can emit smoke once thrown, they take a second to take full effect, but are excellent cover from snipers and great decoys for 203 and 249 fire, also for Frag Grenades, enemies will typically shoot in here regardless due to snipers using smoke to set up their bi-pods, so try to toy with your enemy, reload and recharge times are your best bet for a quick frontal assault. Note: All grenades have a "cook" time, in which you have that much time before they detonate, flash bangs are about 2 seconds, frags about 5, and Smokes are usually 8-11 seconds. More on cooking above.
Rules of Engagement - The Rules of Engagement are simple, positively identify that your target is an enemy force before firing. Hitting teammates will increase your ROE points, which is put as negative points onto the score list, killing a teammate or hitting any teammates at all before 30 seconds into a round is an automatic ROE violation, you will lose a hefty amount of points and be kicked from the server. Everyone has an ROE point limit, differentiating based on the server, the more damage you do to your team, the higher it goes. Watch your fire means something!
Dying - Dying is simple, take too much damage and you will get a KIA, or Killed In Action for the less knowing. Every time you die you will get 10 points taken off your total score, don’t worry though, these do not force a negative score unto you unlike ROE points. You will respawn once the round is over.
Status Effects:
Health - I’ll make this swift. Green is full health, you move and aim at full speed. Yellow is moderate health, the mid-point, your aim is slightly altered and shaky, and you move a bit slower. Red is severe, your aim is horrendously altered and extremely shaky, sniping while in the red is nearly impossible. You move very slow and can be killed quickly. But don’t think you can only take three bullets, your status changes depending on the severity of where you were hit and how much, a head shot is an instant kill, almost always with kidney shots as well. Stomach is instant yellow and severe bleeding, shoulders are possible yellow with moderate bleeding. Hands and feet are very minor with low bleeding. Lower and mid arms and legs are minor, and upper arms are moderate, while thighs and inner-thighs are high-moderate.
Bleeding - In this status, newly implemented to America’s Army, you will continually lose blood based on the severity of your injury. Minor injuries will cause blood loss for a minute or so, while more severe ones can last nearly the entire round, the only way to stop this is to get a medic over to patch you up. While bleeding your aiming will be severely altered and poor. I’ve seen no evidence that bleeding can actually cause death to your character yet, but then again- it will usually be the reason you get killed.
Blind/Deaf - From the flash bang as explained earlier, blindness is always accompanied by deafness. The entire screen fades white, the denser the longer it will last, night vision of course raises the effectiveness of blinding attacks.
And that about covers tips and explanations. As you can see there’s quite a bit of things to remember, and all that doesn’t even include the communication cycles such as radio, shouting, whispering, and hand signaling, plus global messages that the opposing forces can see.
Now back to the action, a strange thing about America’s Army is that both teams appear to themselves as U.S. troops. When confronted about this by some confused players, the game designers said something along the lines of "While both teams see the opposing forces as enemy troops from different regions, in reality both teams are U.S. troops aiming for victory." Slightly confusing, but it makes sense. While on the subject, enemy weapons are different than your own troops’ guns. Which you prefer more is a personal preference. For example, your team may be equipped with M16 Assault Rifles, the opposing forces equivaleent to this is the Ak74. The M16 is more accurate, and has two modes, single and burst, while the AK74 is less accurate, but has single fire and auto fire, meaning more ferocious in close range, yet still less accurate. The M24 is rivaled by the AK-Sniper, basically a sniper rifle with a 4x instead of 10-12x zoom that fires much faster than the M24. While less accurate, once again it’s rapid fire rate may save you from enemy forces who can breach your defensive lines and sneak up on you.
Bodies do not disappear in America’s Army, because each round lasts either 10 minutes, all objectives are completed, or all of one team is killed. All bodies will remain on the floor until you respawn the next round, meaning anyone who dies leaves their weapon(s) up for grabs for the remainder of the round. This is why it’s critical to keep key members of the team alive such as the M203 Grenadier or Sniper, if not kept alive, their weapons may be re-claimed by the opposition and used against you.
Gameplay/Game Mechanics:
You may be wondering about the communication cycles mentioned above, and here I shall explain how they work to improve the gameplay. You see, depending on your situation, you may have to use different commo cycles to provide the optimum effectiveness in battle. Most of the time you’ll be using the spoken commands instead of typing them unless it’s a bind or people are in a talkative mood. By pressing your commo cycle button, or specific cycle buttons, you can access an array of spoken commands. They are typically things such as "Grenade!" "Get down!" "Spread out!" "Work as a unit!" "Hooah!" "Up/Down/Left/Right/North/South/East/West!" "Roger!" "Negative!" and many more, along with some humorous ones such as "Grandma was slow, but she was old..." each spoken different depending on the cycle you have chosen. Whispered will say it only to nearby teammates, good because if enemies are close they won’t hear the beep of a radio. Radio is good because your entire team receives the message. Shouting is effective at alerting teammates in a big area of a threat, but enemies can hear this also, albeit in another language, they can still locate you from this. Hand signals signal any squad members in close range to do various things, but they have to derive the message from the signal alone. While in each of these modes you can type your own message, spoken word is quicker to the point.
What makes America’s Army so fun is it’s simply addictive. I can almost guarantee you’ll fall in love with at least one of the levels and play it for a loooong long time, perfecting your technique and raising honor points. Honor points are a number to the left of your name that go up or down by one depending on how many score points you accumulate, they only go down if you get large negative amounts, which only occurs from being vote kicked from a game or killing teammates. The minimum honor is 1, which is extremely low and you must actually work to get honor this low, as the base honor is 9. The highest is 100, which I’m not sure any player has reached yet. If you see someone with 75 honor or so, it usually means they are very good players, or just leech off their team on big-point missions. If your team wins, the entire squad gets some of the points. This can be annoying if you base your gameplay around team work.
Also, if you’re in the army, you can use your @army.com e-mail address to gain a green/yellow symbol to the left of your name showing you off. If you’re in the National Guard, Reserves, and whatnot, you can get a blue icon. Nice touch! The action is fast, furious, and all around fun. Basing battle on teamwork and communication. No single person can beat an entire team for long, and using identical strategies is a good way to lose. Keep it fresh and always leave room to surprise the enemy. Excellent.
System Requirements:
You’ll need a fairly decent computer to run America’s Army at a bearable framerate, so be aware.
The recommended requirements are as follows:
3-D graphics card with 128 MB memory and support for hardware transformation and lightingPentium® IV 2.0 GHz processor or equivalent
English version of Windows® 98/ME/2000/XP Operating System
256 MB RAM
1.6GB of uncompressed hard disk space for game files
Quad-speed CD-ROM (600K/sec sustained transfer rate)
A 100
Windows 98/ME/2000/XP compatible system (including compatible 32-bit drivers for CD-ROM drive, video card, sound card, mouse and keyboard)
DirectX®8.1
100
DirectX®8.1 or higher compatible sound card and drivers
56.6 Kbps modem or other network connection
NVIDIA® nForce™ or other motherboards/soundcards containing the Dolby® Digital Interactive Content Encoder required for Dolby Digital audio
The minimum recommended requirements are also below:
3-D graphics card with 64 MB memory and support for hardware transformation and lighting1.0 GHz processor or equivalent
English version of Windows® 98/ME/2000/XP Operating System
256 MB RAM
1.6GB of uncompressed hard disk space for game files
Quad-speed CD-ROM (600K/sec sustained transfer rate)
A
100 Windows 98/ME/2000/XP compatible system (including compatible 32-bit drivers for CD-ROM drive, video card, sound card, mouse and keyboard)
DirectX®8.1
100
DirectX®8.1 or higher compatible sound card and drivers
56.6 Kbps modem or other network connection
NVIDIA® nForce™ or other motherboards/soundcards containing the Dolby® Digital Interactive Content Encoder required for Dolby Digital audio
Also listed is the bare minimum essential for not having your computer explode:
Pentium3 766 (or equivalent) 128MB RAM
Win98/ME/2000/XP
DirectX8.1
32MB vid card supporting hardware T&L
600MB Hard Drive free space
4x CD-Rom (CD version only)
DirectX 8 compatible sound
56k modem or better
NVIDIA® nForceTM or other motherboards/soundcards containing the Dolby® Digital Interactive Content Encoder required for Dolby Digital audio.
Why an nVIDIA video card is required is because they have [nVIDIA] a deal with the makers of America’s Army (I.E The Army) therefore it is designed around nVIDIA cards, it’ll still work with others, but not as well.
Graphics:
Detailed, colorful, and true to life. The game is fully-3D and compares easily with almost all of todays commercial first-person shooter games. With tons of settings from decals and resolutions, to door decal fade times, shadow details and terrain high-resolution to low-resolution texture blending complexes, you can virtually get even the oldest (Required) video cards running this game at a decent speed. The floors in almost every level are photorealistic, while not bump-mapped, they are extremely high detail and are a pleasure to look at. Character and landscapes are also of the higher calibur, sporting eye movement, lip-synching for the speech and moving accessories such as grenade packs on the character’s belt. And much more. Just brilliant for a free game. Impressive and amazing.
Bullets leave decals in everything, every different terrain, including cloth-like surfaces have not only different decals, but different ricochet effects as well. While explosives only leave large burn-marks on terrains, they may soon be able to damage the terrains with upcoming updates.
Some levels are extremely foggy, such as the original bridge, which makes close combat and silhouette shooting the key to victory. While levels like Bridge, Second Edition are much longer with much less fog, but more paths to get across. Some missions are based around and in buildings, like Pipeline and Swamp Raid. It’s all done very well and all the fighting areas are rather realistic. Excellent quality to say the least! Well done.
Audio:
Sporting full support for Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround sound, mixed with voices straight from actual military personnel, coupled with the most realistic shooting-based sound effects out there, it’s hard to beat the realism here. Grenades will literally deafen you for a few seconds if your sound is high enough, you’ll want to cover your ears as an automatic rifleman sets up next to you and unloads 200 rounds into the oppositions’ location as the bullets go flying, loud and intimidating, such as the real gun. The unique sounds of 203 rounds being shot into the air as mortars and landing on you position, from the odd whistling to the earth shattering "BOOM!" it all blends together superbly well. Kudos to the sound team for delivering one of the most exhilarating military simulations available to the general public today.
Controls:
[Controls are fully customizable, so this section will not be reviewed, and will receive a default 8.0 for having fully customizable controls, but your opinion and strategizing will lead you to your own conclusion, higher or lower.]
Conclusion:
For a completely free game, you can claim it’s flawless, but in the fairness of it still being a game, and a first-person shooter, it must be compared as so, regardless of cost. Mounting near-perfect sound with top-end visuals and absolutely superb and addictive, near role-playing style gameplay, America’s Army is unique, fun, and exciting. Make friends, make a clan, get your own server, whatever you want. And don’t worry about someone stealing your identity, your account name is only editable from the site, and once it’s changed you can only use the new one, unless you change it back. No using names that already exist. And now with PunkBuster anti-cheat protection, servers are more secure than ever, every-changing menu and loading screen layouts leave the game feeling more and more fresh, plus the always-more-detailed updates, 1.9, the current version as of the time of this review being written, makes 1.0 look primitive! While work still needs to be done in the shadowing department, everything seems great, it’s well worth the download and there’s no risk of money-loss involved, so even if you don’t like the game, you can simply delete it. How can you complain? Go for it! www.americasarmy.com
Post-note: The first half of screenshots are from America’s Army: Operation Version 1.9.0, the last half are from America’s Army: Special Forces. Also, the first half were taken by me personally, yet unfortunately I had to downgrade the quality so they would be accessable to low bandwidth folks. To see nicer images, you’re free to visit the America’s Army Website.
