Alright. Let’s get this out of the way real fast – I’m a huge fan of tactical squad based realism shooters. Armed Assault, Operation Flashpoint, and of course, America’s Army. I played America’s Army for years. This can be a positive bias (huge fan of the genre), and a negative bias (expecting quite a bit), so my review is a little conflicted. I’ll do my best though.

That's from a smoke grenade upstairs. I think.

Gameplay. This is the meat and potatoes of any tactical shooter. 

Unfortunately, this is both the best and worst part of the game. In terms of squad-based tactical shooters, the game is excellent. Teamplay is heavily promoted through the game mechanics. If you get a good organized team going with solid leadership, you can get lost in this game for hours.

However, it’s held back by the worst hit detection system I’ve EVER seen. No, I’m not a sniper hogging self-proclaimed crackshot that blames the game for every miss, but this is a little ridiculous. I’ve shot at people from a few feet away with a fully automatic M249, and seen the wall light up with smoke from my bullets directly behind them. Most close range firefights consist of practically standing in each other’s faces emptying clips. The game is PROMOTING spray and pray with this god awful hit system – I hit more often if I shoot AROUND them in a wide spread than I do with a double tap to the chest or head. This is, of course, a deathblow to the tactical shooter genre, and the most common complaint I hear before people quit the game in a huff of rage.

So in short… this game has potential. A LOT of it. But they need to fix the hit detection, whatever the problem is. Which is going to be hard, seeing as they’ve canned the development team…

Gameplay: 5.5/10 – For me, the good aspects are just barely good enough to keep me logging in for an hour or two at a time. But for people who don’t love tactical shooters I doubt this will pan out.

Let's move on to the graphics now.

They’re not bad, although they’re not what I expected from the beautiful UT3 engine. It’s still not bad though. Definitely not Crysis level, but it’s solid enough. A major complaint is there is no AA (anti-aliasing), unless you want to turn your HUD off…. What? That doesn’t make any sense. What this means is that you’re more likely to have a lot of jagged edges in the game, or as I call them, “jaggedies”. AA smoothes out the jaggedies and makes the game look nicer. No AA in a game this day and age… just seems weird.

The game is plagued with visual bugs. Often you’ll pull out a grenade, and you’ll see this…

It's a grenade! No, it's a gun! Wait...

The physics are alright, you fall down somewhat naturally when shot, unless you are only critically wounded – in which case you land in the same fetal position every time. The guns look decent enough, nothing flashy, but they’re not supposed to be. (Gold plated desert eagles? Pfft. This is the Army!)

Graphics:  6/10 – Good enough, but not a ton of eye candy. No AA is a big negative.

Next up, we have sound.

This is probably one of the most impressive aspects of the game, which isn’t saying a whole lot. I wish there was some decent ambient noise… but the weapons sound pretty good. There’s no over exaggerated booms (think Miami Vice) and when the shooter is far enough away, the sound of the bullets landing around you are louder than the crack of the rifle. Very immersive.

What really grabbed me about this game is it seems like it’s the first game I’ve ever played to really get VoIP right. It’s clearer than most Teamspeak or Ventrilo servers I’ve played on. It is very easy to understand people. Bravo on the VoIP, guys!

Sound: 7.5/10 – Lacking ambient sounds, but the guns have a satisfying quality to them, and the VoIP is stellar.

Now for the controls.

As with most tactical shooters, they’re a LITTLE clunky. But these games aren’t about running around, bunny hopping with precision, and so on. Either way, the sliding into crouch/prone make you feel like you’ve lost complete control of your character. Leaning left and right are iffy if you’re too near a wall.

A lot of the times it feel like you’re fighting with the game to go where you need to, especially in firefights. It doesn’t feel natural. Don’t even bother trying to ‘vault’ over an obstacle to reach cover during a firefight. It’s so slow and clunky that you end up getting shot, provided that the hit detection decides to work for a few seconds.  It is also fairly disappointing that there is no cover system in a tactical shooter that’s released in this day and age, especially one that’s more urban based… but ah well.

Controls: 5/10 – Frustrating, but they get the job done if you are patient.

The bottom line.

This is a tactical shooter with a lot of potential. And if the attention paid to the rest of the series is any indication, this is a shooter to watch. They’ve been pretty good about releasing updates dealing with bugs in the previous renditions. Let’s just hope they do the same here.

Overall: 6/10 – Playable, but only if you really love tactical shooters/simulators. If you take into account the price (free) it's easily worth it.