America's Army: True Soldiers Preview

PAX 2007 Preview

The America’s Army game has long been an online shooter that offers a true synchronicity between the FPS genre and the US Military. Now, the series is gearing up for it’s debut on the 360, allowing the primarily online game to take fully advantage of what Xbox Live can allow for multiplayer gameplay. Using the GRAW 2 game engine, America’s Army: True Soldiers strives to recreate the Army experience through online and single-player modes, complete with realistic situations and weaponry.

Red Storm, the developers of the game, really wanted to leverage Army support for the game and make the experience true to the experience. In order to achieve this, the developers spend a significant amount of time with the military, training with Special Forces to make an authentic experience.

When beginning America’s Army: True Soldiers, you can create your character, doling out starting points for skills like marksmanship and stealth depending on how you want to play your soldier, customizing their look and even giving them a nickname that the other soldiers in your unit will refer to them as. As you progress through the game and do well, you’ll gain experience and be able to evolve your soldier. The group dynamic is very well done here, as your squadmates won’t rely on you to move them constantly, but rather act quite smart on their own instead of waiting for you to give them orders before they do anything.

Given the connection to the US Army, True Soldiers has a decent amount of modern army tech throughout. One item is the Raven UAV that will fly over the field and give you a bird’s eye view of the battlefield and give away your enemies’ positions. Additionally, fallen soldiers can be healed after they’re down and even dragged to safety.

The game will have robust online features, including a whopping 16-player co-op mode and “non-lethal” wargames mode that allows parents to completely turn off blood in favor of paint. True Soldiers is gearing up to release this October.