Ubisoft under fire for America's Army

Ubisoft has had to fend off anti-war protesters up in arms about the America's Army series of games.

Former soldier Ryan Lockwood, backed by protest group Veterans Against the War, claims using US Army tax funds to pay for a glorified recruitment tool is wrong.

"It's definitely a recruitment tool, and the fact that it's put out by the federal government and being funded from our tax dollars sounds illegal to me," ex-soldier and Iraq veteran Ryan Lockwood told MTV Multiplayer.

"I'm not exactly sure what the laws are, but if it is being funded by our tax dollars, we have the right to say, 'Hey, stop taking our money and using it for stupid sh**.'"

Lockwood claimed the difference between America's Army and Call of Duty 4 was the latter being developed as a hyper-realistic game rather than a simulation, and also not with US tax money.

Ubisoft US president Laurent Detoc defended the right to publish the America's Army console game, and said the publisher had no plans for any further instalments - although he stopped short of promising an end to the series.

Ubisoft, rather unsurprisingly, decided not to publish the "official US Army game" in Europe.

After all, we have all those Army adverts where people who just wanted to be engineers ended up making aeroplanes. They're pretty bad.