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America’s Army: True Soldiers allows players to immerse themselves within the infantry experience of a modern Soldier. Play in single players mode and take on roles such as Rifleman, Grenadier, Automatic Rifleman and Sniper. Or, play in multiplayer mode using the Xbox LIVE gaming service Clan support to compete online.

Genre: First-Person Shooter

Publisher: Ubisoft

Developer: Red Storm Entertainment

Online Play:

Local Play:

November 20, 2007 –
In this job there are very few moments when the thought, “Man, I wish I had a different life” enter one’s head. America’s Army: True Soldiers is one of the rarest of games that fosters such a notion. It’s a game that’s so bad it makes me wish that IGN didn’t have a hard and fast rule governing the use of expletives. Given the opportunity, this review would have been filled with f-bombs, s-words, and plenty of creative combinations of human body parts and sharp objects that would be followed by more f-bombs and s-words. The game is just that bad.

And now, on to our review.

First, with the good (don’t worry, this won’t take long): America’s Army allows players to meld their own soldier… to an extent. You start with the shell of a recruit and then craft him by assigning attribute points that you’ve earned into five different categories such as marksmanship, physical training, fortitude, medic, and valor. You’ll notice an obvious increase in skill and combat proficiency as you progress, but that’s just assuming that you have the intestinal resilience to make it through some of the single- or multiplayer games.

Not nearly as fun as it looks.When you first pop in the game you’ll be greeted with three core modes. There’s basic training, war games, and multiplayer. Basic training is what you’d expect, just blast through each of the different weapons in the game to get a feel for them. But throughout the nine separate missions I couldn’t help but wonder why the levels weren’t consolidated into one lengthy training course. The fact that you have to hop in and out of menus and loading screens feels outdated and, to be frank, a complete waste of time.

Once you’re well versed in the art of gunplay and explosives, it’s time to take the fight to the missions against the dreaded terrorists, right? Wrong. After you’re done with the training sequences it’s time for you to engage in the “war games” portion, meaning that you and a squad of teammates are armed with paintball guns. That’s right, paintball guns. When shot, enemies won’t die; instead, they’ll sit on the ground, hands crossed in their laps. The sense of achievement from this is overwhelming. Only not at all.

Once you’re on the battlefield (re: paintball course) another one of the downsides makes itself known. You see, America’s Army is just a poor imitation of Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter. The badly-modeled characters are your basic soldiers with sound clips that sound like they’re out of a cheesy ’70s flick, and the “mission structure” is nothing more than a series of rally points with accompanying baddies. The real kick to the nether-regions (or at least, one of the many) is that throughout each mission you’re forced to stay within a certain perimeter of your commanding officer. This wouldn’t so bad if the friendly AI were actually intelligent enough to wait for you after you’ve cleaned up the baddies they left, but they don’t. Sometimes they’ll even sprint away from you making it very tough for you to keep pace, thus leading to “failure.” But you can just restart from one of the handy-dandy checkpoints, right? No, that would have been way too functional for America’s Army.

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