I dislike starting out on a negative note, but I feel as if I have to due to the sheer amount of frustration I experienced with America’s Army 3. Avoid this game at all costs, it’s not worth the 4+ gigabyte download to anyone who wasn’t a fan of the original game, even then, you might want to give some serious consideration to the amount of grief encountered while playing this in any capacity. There’s a solid game buried under this awful mess, a game that I can enjoy, when it works. The amount of “realism” offered can’t be matched by very many other games, but nor can the frustration.

During the open beta, there was a multitude of problems with the game; ladders would break your ability to mouse look, network issues were out of control and little things like your HUD vanishing every few rounds cropped up. Now, normally, when a game leaves beta and makes the transition to the product you think the developers intended, this would go away, right? Wrong, horribly, horribly wrong. At this point in the release the game is arguably more broken than it was in beta, and no longer are the bugs and glitches acceptable.

My first outing with the launch version of America’s Army 3 resulted in just not being able to log in at all, for hours. After finally being able to log in, I started a new character to run through the training with, as everything done in beta had been wiped. Upon completion of the first training course I was inexplicably notified that I had failed, although I had scored just about the same time as I had in the beta. This continued regardless of what my score was, until finally I passed. However, after passing, this obviously hadn’t been communicated to the servers meant to retain this data and all of the completed training I had done was simply gone. I then just didn’t log in for a day or two to give them time to fix whatever monkey wrench was violently thrown into the works of America’s Army 3.

After the displeasure with how the game had performed so far had dissipated, I logged in to find my character from the beta inexplicably restored, however the same bugs still existed. I needed to “enlist” again, which consists of a poorly illustrated cut scene of a generic young man joining the military. I couldn’t enlist, no matter how hard I tried. Clicking the enlist button resulted in the game locking up, so I tabbed out of the game and back in, nothing. I tried any combination of things you can imagine to get into this game; lucky rabbit feet, standing on my head, praying to strange Gods, nothing worked. Eventually I just had to give it up for another day or so if for nothing else than to prevent my monitor from finding a new home on the ground two stories below my window.

My third attempt resulted in the bizarro world equivalent of success, and I was willing to take it without asking questions. The game now seemed to remember all of the training I had done in the beta, so I no longer needed to retake it. The frustration now washing off, I decided to take it online and see how the gameplay fared, however, it just wasn’t in the cards just yet. Entering a server resulted in the game locking up, exactly the same way attempting to do the initial training had. I restarted; I mucked about with options, and once again found myself doing anything I could to make it work. But it simply refused. Once again, I closed the game and strung together some barely coherent diatribe that can’t even be repeated at the America’s Army 3 icon sitting in my Steam list.

Luckily, I was able to dig up what the problem was. There seems to be a tiny 1kb file in the directory of the game that, for some people, needs to be deleted every time you play, to prevent the misery I had experienced for so long. The required steps now taken, I found myself in the game, at last. The visuals are fantastic, everything is painstakingly modeled down to the last detail, all powered by UE3, and this is a strong area of the game. The audio stands out as being just as detailed as the graphics; it’s a real treat to listen to. Firing my gun is unleashed probably the closest to life gunshot audio I’ve heard in a game. When you’re on the receiving end of the gunfire the sounds also seem to be representative of what would happen, having never been shot at I can’t really be too sure, but it makes you want to dive behind anything you can. The visuals and audio really don’t leave anything to be desired, another clue that there is a really good game that someone obviously cared about somewhere in here.

Combat stretches across the five maps the game shipped with, strange, considering how many great maps they had established previously in the series, but that just isn’t really noticeable amidst all the other atrocities the game has committed at this point. The maps themselves are laid out very well. There’s always a variety of ways to go, nooks and crannies to bunker down in and wait for the enemy to stroll into your sights. They feel like real locations, not like a map designed to be fun to play on. There’s nothing in them that feels out of place or like a bizarre concession made for the sake of gameplay. Mission wise there’s everything you’d expect from a tactical team-based game. There’s a VIP Escort, Secure and Extract, Destroy, Activated Objective, Secure and Defend and Take and Hold. These are also all very fun to play, when everything is working right. They all allow for a very different approach to teamwork, some lending themselves more to wild firefights while others require you to work in unison with other squads, which tends to actually happen more than you might expect. The content here is solid, it works as well as it should and is largely fun to play.

The game offers a variety of roles that you can play during a mission. You can go from a Basic Rifleman, to Automatic Riflemen, Grenadier, Marksmen or even fill in as a leader for any of the squads on your team. These classes feel very specialized, when you’re the Automatic Riflemen the feel of being behind the trigger of a tube sending automatic death out is there, unless of course your gun is bugged so all you can do is run around and try not to get shot. This is yet another area where the game displays competency that is marred by the fact that it just does not work when it needs to a lot of the time. Falling in step with feeling like a guy who is part of a larger team, America’s Army 3 offers some of the highest quality voice communication out there. I never once had a problem understanding another player and everyone seemed to understand me. The vast majority of the people you run into are willing to play as a team, which is nice, because there really isn’t any other way to be successful.

I can think of one match, totaling probably twenty minutes of my playtime that went flawlessly. These twenty minutes made me endure so many matches that followed, hoping to recapture the fun I had in the single perfect game, and like previous outings, didn’t work. When you dig down deep enough and all the stars align, the game can offer you as much fun as anything else out there, but these instances occur so far and few between I just can’t recommend slogging through the large amount of pain and frustration to get to the intended experience. I wanted to like this game, I still want to like this game, because the series has been fantastic, and the proposition of putting in on UE3 and bringing it into 2009 is an exciting one. I’m sure at some point in the future they can restore the series to its former glory, but as it stands, this is a very broken product that doesn’t warrant your time in the state that it exists.

Doin’ It RIGHT: - Graphics are great. - Lots of fun, if it works. - It’s free. - You can uninstall it.	Doin’ It RONG: - More bugs than functional features. - Sparse map selection. - Account management works on and off. - The training is still boring. - Nowhere near a finished product.
FINAL SCORE: 4 / 10

       

Tags: America's Army 3, PC, Review

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 25th, 2009 at 12:40 pm and is filed under PC, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.