Just when you thought it was safe to trust Ubisoft, America's Army rolls in like a grenade at your feet. After a stellar streak of nailing must-play titles, they deliver a complete dud with this Army sponsored shooter.
The game was co-developed by the US Army, experts in blowing things up, but not at developing games. It shows. Though built on the same engine, it separates itself from the fantastic GRAW series with its first-person view, shoddy graphics, and nearly non-existent offline modes; all issues that separate it in a negative way.
The first-person view in itself is not a negative, but the implementation makes for a terrible gaming experience. There is a fine line between realistic and frustrating, and this game trips clumsily into the wrong side of it. There are no crosshairs on-screen as with so many other shooters. This speaks to the game's desire for a realistic experience, but makes actually hitting anything with any kind of accuracy a royal pain. Pulling the left trigger pulls the gun up to help with sighting, but that is little help when you get to the point that you are no longer firing at the green panels at the range or sniping. Pulling up your sights and running across the map is a makes it feel as though you are fumbling with your weapon. Throwing grenades is such a disaster you should get and award every time you do it and fail to blow yourself up. The game uses an awkward control scheme that requires you to use your left stick for distance and the right stick for left-to-right aiming, finally releasing the right trigger when you finally have your throw lined up.
Graphically and sonically, the game is a mess. It does not deserve a mention in the same breath as GRAW, let alone tout that it runs on the same engine. Then again, Fatal Inertia and Gears Of War were both built on the Unreal Engine, which have about the same chasm in quality as GRAW 2 and America's Army. The drab maps suffer from graphics that are well behind the times, and look average for a last-gen game. The character models fare slightly better, until they speak. The voices are so far off from the lips that it looks like one of those classically bad dubbing jobs done on old karate films. To boot, after you select your character's nickname, the game wants to use it any chance it can. This is fine, but the characters shout your name as if they are your parent yelling down the street to get you to come in; even when the rest of the sentence they are saying is in a normal tone of voice.
The offline portion of the game is stripped down to offer you a chance to train for combat, with no campaign in sight. The offline component of the game only offers you two options, Basic Training or Wargames. The Basic Training mode offers nine training exercises, with the first seven focused on specific weapons. Gamers enter the exercise with a brief instruction on what its specific weapon is, then get a mind-numbingly repetitive order regarding practice versus qualification, and then finally get to pick up the weapon from the table next to the Sergeant. After you run through some practice shots with the weapon, you can switch over to the 'qualification' lane and begin your test. Each weapon has a certain threshold for qualifying, with different levels of weapon mastery available for each. The remaining two Basic Training exercises are a full obstacle course with weapons ranges to break up the monotony and a mission dry run, which will get you prepared for the other offline mode. In total, the whole Basic Training experience lives up to the 'basic' in the title, and will take you an hour to complete.
