America's Army for 360

Red Storm, the team responsible for multiplayer in GRAW 1 and 2, has revealed it's working on a new America's Army game exclusively for Xbox 360.

It's called True Soldiers and is expected in the US this September, although publisher Ubisoft was unavailable to confirm a European date.

Team-play is the big focus of the title - as you might expect from an officially licensed Army simulation game - and online battles will be won and lost based on tactics and communication, rather than rocket jumps and chainsaw attacks.

You'll be able to play as one of five classes: Rifleman, Grenadier, Auto-Rifleman, Sniper, and Team Leader. These all progress in roughly the same way, by earning experience points for completing training events, objectives or entire missions. Once you rack them up, you can spend them in one of four main skills, each branching out into a further two sub-skills. For instance, Snipers will want points in Marksmanship, as well as Focus and Observation sub-skills, and possibly some Stealth.

Squad Leaders will make the plays, so to speak. They can order in artillery strikes and coordinate attacks using interactive maps and reconnaissance data. Team Leaders report to them and order their Fire Teams around based on those instructions.

Alongside standard team Deathmatch on Xbox Live there will be eight co-operative missions for up to 16 people to take part in. There's also a new mode called Competitive Training that puts you up against up to 15 others on one of three different target ranges. You'll then have to blow the stuffing out of anything that pops up, like targets or vehicles. You can choose to have a time limit or a score limit, it's up to you - it's also a great place for clans to hone their abilities.

Red Storm also has a grand plan to reward honest, helpful players, and to increase active socialisation online. It's based around a system that rewards you with "Honor" points when you play, well, honourably [surely "honorably" -Ed]. And these will dictate your rank and standing on the all important leaderboards.

You can earn points through respect tokens, too, which are are dished out at the end of games. And it's up to you which helpful or nice player you want to reward with your share. Recruiting people into your clan, or Army Unit, will also net you respect. So in summary, the more you sew, the more you reap; help and be rewarded for it.

It all sounds like it's making for an engrossing and realistic Army Simulation experience. But whether we'll actually see a release here after the previous version was mysteriously canned is yet to be seen.

We'll keep you posted.