America's Army: Operations

Excellent free game for those who want a semi-realistic online shooter with emphasis on teamwork and tactical gameplay. And don't mind the lack of eye-candy.

The gameplay is solid and has some very nice details that add realism into it. The aiming system is great, you can shoot like in most shooters, with the help of crosshair if you like, but to hit something from a longer distance, you need to bring you sights up by keeping the right mouse button pressed. And just like in real life, running around and jumping makes your hands shake, as does getting shot at, even if the bullets don't hit you directly. So the best way to get kills in long range combat is to wait in cover for your hands to stop shaking, and then make short accurate bursts at the enemy. It's a good compromise between realism and spray'n'pray gameplay.

The health system is one of the best I've seen, when you get hit, you don't necessarily die instantly, you start bleeding, and unless there's a medic to stop the bleeding, you might even bleed to death, but little bleeding won't stop you from taking few of your enemies with you in kamikaze style. You won't gain your "health" back even if medic heals you, they can ONLY stop the bleeding. Being wounded also affects your aiming and movement speed. Heavily wounded soldier will most likely loose long range fights, so you have to adapt your gameplay to suit the situation, resorting to grenades might not be a bad idea when wounded.

This game is not very "noob friendly", the difficulty is high, and you will die often in the beginning. But if you're patient you will learn the tricks and start getting more kills than deaths. Like in most online shooters, knowing the map is the key to success, but in America's Army it is even more critical thanks to object based gameplay. No respawns also means lot of waiting around for newbies and rushers, but it also makes the game very exciting, being the last guy alive and knowing all eyes are on you really gets your adrenaline flowing.

AA has honour system which will track your kills; you will gain "levels" for killing enemies and completing objectives. You will only lose honour if you kill your own team-mates. Each player starts as honour 10 and begins to work up from there. Your honour level doesn't have straight effect on the game, new weapons and maps are unlocked by going through training missions.

The graphics are a bit outdated and after many updates the engine has a slightly clunky feel to it at times. But the graphical quality is nothing that would prevent you from enjoying this game, with anti-aliasing on from control panel and all settings cranked up high, it looks very good for its age. But for total graphics whores this game is not recommended.

Sounds are one of the game's best parts, they actually help you while playing, with a good headset you can hear the enemy coming from behind you, or grenade falling next to you. Guns sound, look and behave realistic in all ways.

AA is a team based game, with a good team the game is at its best, but playing with inexperienced or impatient players against a clan can be frustrating. Finding a good server to play on is the most important thing in AA. Some servers have too much lag, others too few players or are just playing with rules that don't satisfy you. At the days of version 2.6 most servers seemed to be using SF mods, meaning everybody had 203(grenade launcher), and a scope attached to their M4s, this changed the game experience completely, some like it more than others. On some maps it just doesn't work that well. I’m not 100% sure if this trend has continued in the newest versions.

Problems while playing AA are mostly caused by other players, they might camp, use dropshots, cheat and so on. But those people are around in all online games. AA itself is very stable at this stage, the latest version has never crashed on me, neither have I been kicked out of servers for false PB alerts or anything like that.

Version 2.7 added vehicles, 3 new maps, co-op against AI, new weapons, and lots of bugs. 2.8 fixed some of those bugs and throws in a map editor as well. Co-op offers a nice change for AA veterans, it's a bit more relaxed environment to play on as everyone is on the same team, unfortunately the AI's lack of intelligence also adds to that "relaxed atmosphere" making it a bit too easy at times(especially Snakeplain), and hence it grows old much quicker than the old maps. Compared to previous versions of America's Army not that much has changed in the basic gameplay otherwise. The newest, and possibly the last version with this engine, to my knowledge, is the current 2.8.3 - America's Army:Special Forces (Overmatch). After that there will be a whole new America's Army using unreal engine 3.

The download is free, so it's definitely worth trying out. And don't give up after 5mins of playing just because you get frustrated in the training missions. They can be annoying at times, but in the end they are quite quick to pass, though I do wish they would had added "skip BS" button in the start of those training missions. If you already have some newer version of AA on your computer you can download patches to bring it up to date, if not, you need to download the whole game, the file is about 2Gb in size, but it's easily worth the time and disk space.