America's Army: Rise of a Soldier [Xbox]

America's Army: Rise of a Soldier is trying something different. This is no simple Call of Duty, Ghost Recon, or even Rainbow Six. It's one of the few shooters to actually attempt something beyond the mechanics of a firefight: you know, the physics of firing pins that send bullets flying into people who then fall down. That's old hat. We've been playing that part as long as we've had video games.

What's new here is another fundamental element of firefights: the simple fact that people desperately want not to get shot. In the real world, when guns go off, people get behind walls or press themselves into the ground. America's Army is the first shooters to model the effect of "suppression" -- the term for the simple fact that being shot at tends to mess up your aim. The concept was featured prominently in Gearbox's Brothers in Arms, but only for the AI. And it was a big part of the gameplay in Pandemic's Full Spectrum Warrior, but that wasn't a conventional shooter. So America's Army gets the honor of being the first first-person shooter where gunfire can affect you even if it doesn't hit you.

What America's Army does differently is calculate a combat effectiveness -- basically, this is your accuracy -- determined partly by whether people are firing at you and how close they're getting. The value is displayed on a meter in the corner of the screen. You can also improve it by deploying a bipod on your sniper rifle, being close to a fire team leader, stopping to catch your breath after sprinting, or improving your marksmanship skill, for example. An important part of the gameplay is that this combat effectiveness applies to you as well as the AI, friendly and enemy. So it behooves you to keep firing at those guys hiding behind that wall even if you're not hitting them.

Also unique is America's Army's RPG elements, which are tied into the combat model. You have a set of stats that can be improved by spending points however you like. In addition to a marksmanship skill to increase your combat effectiveness, leadership improves your teammates' accuracy, lifesaving lets you recover faster from wounds, stealth make it easier to stay unseen, and so on. Each skill has multiple effects, all spelled out for you, as well as occasional "critical successes" clearly indicated on screen. These critical successes can add a new layer to the game. For instance, as a sniper, you can go prone and wait for a "silent shot", which will make the next shot inaudible to enemies.

The graphics are a step back from the latest generation shooters, and you're not going to be driving tanks or firing rocket-propelled grenades, but the gameplay more than makes up for this. This isn't a flashy shooter. Instead, it's a deep one. It's also sometimes a tedious one, as you have to play through training missions to get to the fighting. Training missions can be beaten at three different levels, with some absurd prerequisites for elite qualification. The elite sniper training mission, for example, gives you a 20-second window to hit a target, but it occurs randomly within the span of 48 hours. That's forty-eight hours of real time. Is it a joke or just hardcore? Probably a little of both.