America's Army 3 - Free brainwashing game!

When a game is labeled as “Free”, I can’t help but put my grubby little gamering fingers all over it. But it is really free if the game was paid for by taxpayer’s money? I’m not sure, but I do know that if my money has gone towards this game without my permission, then I have to try it. This is the case with the newly released America’s Army 3, a game developed by and for the US Army.

America’s Army 3 is a game designed to brainwash recruit upstanding American citizens into the Army by glorifying the life of a soldier. Now I’ve never been in any sort of military organization but I can imagine that they’ve tried to make this game as “realistic” as possible while making it seem fantastic to be in the Army. For me however, I simply found the main game to be slow, confusing and frustrating.

When you first load up the game, you create a soldier and just like in the real army, you have to go through boot camp. This involves all the cool parts of the army such as the assault course, weapons training etc. I can’t imagine that it would attract too many new recruits if the game shouted at you constantly and made you clean the floors (I’m assuming that’s what happens – if movies have taught me anything it’s that boot camp is no fun). As it happens, in game I found the training to be the most interesting and fulfilling. There are achievements for getting better grades in each of the training missions and it moves along at a reasonable pace, only interrupted by annoying hand painted cut scenes.

Once you’ve finished the training (or at least had enough for the time being), I found it difficult to work out what to do next. It doesn’t look like there is a single player campaign after training so you’re forced to play online multiplayer. Here’s where it really goes down hill. From this point on, it feels like a rushed game. The bugs and performance issues are tolerable in comparison to the pacing of the game. It is slow. You get within sniper distance of the enemy and from this point, you have to be really careful. It’s really difficult to find your enemy and when you do, it’s even harder to distinguish if the player is friend or foe. The only difference as far as I’m aware is that the enemy doesn’t wear helmets but I found it really hard to tell. So you spend all your time crawling and crouching from one hiding place to another, hoping that you’ll spot the enemy before he spots you, on your way to “I don’t know where”, only heading there because everyone else seems to be running around blindly too. If you get shot during any of this, you have to wait for one of the teams to win, either by reaching the objective or finishing off the enemy team. This could take 20 minutes! It’s not much fun spectating whilst every single player moves as slowly as you did when you were alive.

When you start a game, you chose your role. If you pick one of the squad leaders, you have to specify orders. This game would probably be much easier if everyone used voice comms and really treated it like a team exercise, unfortunately everyone runs off and does their own thing (like in nearly every other game on the internet). If you’re lucky enough to get the sniper role, you have a massive advantage as you’re the only one who can see more than a couple of hundred yards. If not, you’d better be careful. In my first 10 games, I think I killed one guy and got killed in nearly all of them. Yay me!