America's Army has a pretty steep learning curve so you need to be prepared to work at it. While the details are all (presumably) very realistic and I like the animations and what not from the weapons, it seemed a bit G.I Joe to me.
I used to play back in 2005/2006/2007 and was doing quite well..just went back to their site and apparently my email address does not have an account registered to it! Funny that...so if I was to start playing again I'd have to start over!!! UGH.
Anyway, I have some (normally) frustrating memories of having to spend hours and hours on the training missions before I could actually play online and have anything other than a basic rifile and pistol. However I was also very proud that I (because at the time I had no life, friends, job, ambitions, sexual urges) was able to perform all of the tests to the top standard to recieve the ability to be a full on sniper and recieve the special forces status.
From having a quick browse of their website it still seems to be a team vs team thing, sort of like Counter Strike or Battlefield? I heard somewhere they were introducing actual "missions" which you played with online buddies (by buddies I mean complete strangers, some of whom may use 4chan). I hope that's not true...
My fondest memory of America's army however was of 3 maps, one was a house with big fields around it (I think this was at night), one was a really snowy bridge with 2 big towers either end and the other was a sort of oil refinery or nuclear plant or something. After being killed (fairly quickly) I had to wait about 20 minutes before the round was over to be able to respawn. Unless you were really good (I was simply average) then you'd get very bored very quickly.
The other was having to alt-tab out every time you started playing if you had a multi core processor (I do) and set the priority to "below average" otherwise your ping would be cataclysmicly bad.
Has anything changed since I last played then, Jason?