America's Army: Rise of a Soldier [Canceled] [PS2]

America's Army was developed with government dollars, which were earmarked to help a recruiting crisis that goes back to 1999. Needless to say, the recruitment crisis is even more dire now, so the Army is eager to get the game -- and it's associated message that you should consider calling a nearby recruitment office -- onto the larger console market. But making a PC game available as a free download is relatively easy. It's not so easy to make a console game, where a slice of the action goes to the console maker. Enter Ubisoft.

"Gamers want authenticity," says producer Tony Van, "and Ubisoft is all about authenticity." Or at least first-person shooters with a hardcore tactical element. So Ubisoft hired developer Secret Level to port America's Army to the PlayStation 2 and Xbox. While giving a press demonstration of the game, Ubisoft took obvious pride in their "SMEs", as they called them. The acronym stands for "subject matter experts", which sounds a bit cold and analytical, as if it should be wearing a lab coat and pontificating from behind a podium.

But these SMEs were just soldiers who are either assigned to the America's Army franchise or looking to make a little extra money as consultants or showmen for us press guys. Decked out in their camo fatigues, they were very personable, happy to talk to us at length, and certainly knew their stuff. There's something humbling about chatting with one of them when your credentials consist of being able to tell an M249 from an M16 because you play a lot of Battlefield 2.

Their role in America's Army is to lend the game a bit of the authenticity Van is touting. Sergeant Doug Davidson elaborated a bit on the practical impact of his job. For instance, he pointed out that many games let you crouch indefinitely, something us gamers hardly think twice about. So he had Van duck-walk with a .50 caliber Barrett sniper rifle. "That thing weighs over thirty pounds. Guess what you're not going to see in this game?" he joked. At the end of the day, Davidson called over one of the designers and a few producers for a quick talk. It turns out they've been doing the hats wrong on the character models.

At first glance, America's Army: Rise of a Soldier looks a lot like any other tactical first-person shooter. But the subtitle gives some idea of what's unique about it: an RPG structure folded into the gameplay. As you progress through the single-player missions (or as you play online using your multiplayer account, which progresses separately), you earn experience and ranks, which award you skill points to be spent on your choice of seven skills. Each of these skills has a significant impact on how the game plays.

For example, life-saving skill determines how quickly you can bandage yourself after being shot. When you're hit, the edges of the screen turn red until you take a moment to hold down a button that fills a bandage bar. If you neglect this, your health will decrease. As your skill improves, you fill the bar faster and eventually you can even heal your teammates. When you raise your skills high enough, you increase your chance of an "extraordinary success." In the case of life-saving skill, that means an instant bandaging.

The conditioning skill increases your running speed, how long you can run without your aim swaying from fatigue, and how far you can throw a grenade. An extraordinary success means you'll be able to run for a while without your aim being affected.

The observation skill ties in with the way spotting is handled. When members of your team see an enemy, if it's within a range determined by their observation skill, that enemy will show up as a red contact on a minimap in the lower left of your screen. Similarly, when you see an enemy, if he's within range of your observation skill, he'll show up on all your teammates' minimaps. The higher the observation skill, the farther out you'll be able to designate contacts. However, it's inversely affected by the enemy's stealth skill, which means even though a character model might be visible, it won't be pegged on the minimap.

Another one of your skills is marksmanship, which ties in with how Rise of a Soldier is handling accuracy. Most first-person shooters have a reticule that expands and shrinks depending on your degree of accuracy. But aimed shots in America's Army require that you hold down a button to bring up your gun's iron sights. To get a sense for how accurate your fire is, there's a series of bars in the lower left of the screen, similar to the way signal strength is indicated on a cell phone. The more bars that are filled on this "combat efficiency meter," the more accurate your shots will be. Another skill gives everyone on your team a CEM buff.

This is also connected to how suppression is modeled. The idea is that as someone is shooting at you, you're going to be less focused on carefully aimed return fire. Most games have no way of modeling this for a human player. But in Rise of a Soldier, every bullet that passes within a certain distance will reduce your CEM. This means rapid firing weapons like a SAW are useful as a way of impacting a target's accuracy. The last skill, honor, counters the effect of incoming fire on your CEM. A soldier with a high honor skill can shoot accurately even in the middle of a heated firefight.

Will Rise of Soldier make you want to join the Army? The Army certainly hopes so. The rest of us are just hoping it'll be a good game. It's clearly taking a different angle with its approach to realism and a unique RPG-like progression, so we'll be eager to check out the final version when it shows up.