The first 10 missions of the game will be available for download, free of charge, starting Thursday; the remaining nine missions will follow over the course of the summer. A companion game, "America's Army: Soldiers," showing the nearly limitless career paths a soldier can take, will be ready in the fall.

The two games will cost about $7 million to design and to maintain 140 servers for online play, according to Lt. Col. Casey Wardynski, director of the Army's internal consulting team. That's about the same as a new M1A3 tank, and less than one-half of one percent of the Army's recruitment budget.

Given the high cost of persuading teenagers to join the Armed Forces, Wardynski figures the expense will have been worth it if an additional 300-400 enlist as a result of the game.

"In World War II, we had newsreels. Then came TV ads. More recently we've had banners. This is just the next step," said Wardynski, who also teaches economics at West Point.

"AA:O," as players insist on calling it, begins with basic training at Ft. Benning, Georgia. Recruits run through obstacle courses, practice shooting guns and get barked at -- gently -- by their drill sergeant. (Here's a guy who tells trainees "not to mess up my freshly raked sand pit." Sgt. Hartman from Full Metal Jacket would've eaten him for breakfast.)

Once players have graduated, it's on to a series of team-oriented missions, played online against other gamers in soldiers' boots. In one scenario, players have to defend the Alaskan Pipeline with the 172nd Brigade. Another is a rescue operation, working with the 10th Mountain Division to free a soldier from terrorists' clutches.

Because AA:O -- developed largely at the Naval Post Graduate School in conjunction with private game companies -- is based on the latest engine in the "Unreal" game series, these missions look good. Also the game play is comparable to other squad-based adventures, like "Half-Life: Counter-Strike."

The one big difference: No one gets to be a bad guy in this game. Both sides see themselves as soldiers, and the other gamers as terrorists.

Still, the quality has been high enough to pleasantly surprise many in the gaming community, which was initially skeptical about the recruiting tool.

"A lot of marketing-oriented games suck," Steve Butts, a reviewer with the gaming site IGN, wrote. "This one's being developed as thoroughly and professionally as any other top-shelf shooter."

While critics have been enjoying details like the ultra-accurate recoil on the guns, and the realistic reloading procedure, some gamers -- especially ones who have spent time in the military -- have been disturbed by the sanitized violence of America's Army. In AA:O, no one soaks the floor in blood or cries out to God in pain when they're shot. There's just a paintball-ish splat.

"If you make (the game) graphic in a Saving Private Ryan sense, you get blasted for using gore as entertainment," Wardynski responded.

Other ex-Army gamers resent the idea that the action-laden, slam-bang world of AA:O is representative of real military life.

"Wow, a realistic shooter designed to show you what it is really like in the Army. Do I need a special controller to simulate boot shining?" posted one gamer, ArcherB, to a forum on America's Army.

"Much of Army life is putting up with BS, doing menial things. I spent two years in the Army as a tanker. Still, with all that time in the field, I drove a floor buffer more than a tank by far! I did get to blow stuff up on occasion, but that is not what (the Army) is about. Will the game reflect that?"

The Army is building other computer games with a more authentic feel. In C-Force, which will be used to both train soldiers and to entertain civilians, players take on much more of the day-to-day work of the Army: protecting U.S. aid workers, guarding an embassy or securing a street corner.

The military has a long tradition of using commercial games to train its grunts -- beginning with primitive, 1940s flight simulators bought from a Coney Island amusement park.

But this is the first time the military has crafted a game solely for propaganda purposes.

"This isn't in the works right now, but in the future, suppose you played extremely well. And you stayed in the game an extremely long time. You might just get an e-mail seeing if you'd like any additional information on the Army," Wardynski said.

Or you could just click on that big button in the game's top left corner. You'd be taken to the Army website -- where a whole, new world awaits.