Joint Task Force review

A ginger warmonger by the name of General Sherman once exclaimed 'war is hell,' but evidently he had never played Joint Task Force, a near-future world RTS that's just splashed down, cruise missile-like, in video game emporiums across the land courtesy of Mithis Entertainment.

Set during a fictional but entirely plausible conflict that takes in perennially active hot spots such as Africa, Asia and the Middle East, JTF casts you in the role of Major O’Connell, a grizzled field commander of an elite force comprising selected units of the armed forces of the UN nations. Similar to Team America but on a global scale, this elite group has come together in a bid to eradicate terrorism, regional instability and excessively high crude oil prices. Ok, so I made that last bit up.

Lights, camera, action

One thing that isn’t untrue though is JTF's attempt to introduce some innovation to the genre, which it does through its media approval rating mechanism. You see, much like the recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, war isn't only fought on the battlefield; it's also conducted through the media, with public reaction to your actions playing some part in how your overall operation is faring.

In practice, this means that you can't go round blowing the heads off innocent bystanders' babies with no consequences. There are repercussions for each incidence of collateral damage, and it hits you where it hurts the most - in your wallet. Unlike most other recent RTS games, JTF completely does away with the multiple resource model convention, with cash earned (and spent) through the completion of mission objectives being the means by which you can call for reinforcements.

Rank has its privileges

Treating your troops like your own is rewarded, as there's an RPG-like element that sees officers gain new abilities as they gain combat experience and level up. You can decide which new skills your officers learn once they’ve become eligible, and these vary according to the basic unit type of the officer, but encompass things such as defensive bonuses, greater marksmanship with handheld weaponry and better medical skills.

As a consequence of there being no main bases (or at least, on the JTF side), there are no tank rushed three-minute wonder maps, with most missions instead having you move from one location to another as you hunt down crazed warlords and their flunkies. This means that there are pockets of action and fierce firefights surrounded by frustrating spells of near inactivity, where you'll have to wait for your engineers and medics to slowly patch up your army.

All of the very latest vehicles and armaments of combined arms warfare are included in the game, and are reproduced in painstaking detail, although it’s worth mentioning that while the JTF may be a multinational force, its vehicle seems to be entirely of American origin.

Black Hawks, Apache AH-64's, F-117A's, Humvees, Cruise missiles and M1 A2's all put in an appearance, and they have been modeled so that they are markedly superior to their corresponding opposing units. In a one on one situation involving the AH-64 and a Hind, for example, the Apache can take down its nemesis with relative ease, an imbalance which might have Russian helicopter enthusiasts spluttering over their schematics.

Visuals to die for

Graphically, JTF is right there on the bleeding edge, featuring intricately detailed environments and units which beg to be viewed in their entire close up glory. It's a joy to watch trees splinter and disintegrate as an M1A2 rumbles through them, or a Vulcan cannon spit out gleaming empty shell casings as it rakes fire across an enemy gun emplacement. All this splendour comes at a price though, as the game needs a reasonably high powered machine to render the visuals with high detail settings at a decent frame rate.

Sadly, the sound doesn’t quite fare so well, especially with regard to the voice acting, which seems to have been executed by a group of actors whose hearts just weren’t in it. The unit effects are pretty much what you’d expect and are competently done, but these are let down by a soundtrack that is largely forgettable - in fact, it almost seems as if the whole audio element was cloned from some substandard 1980s action movie.

He won an award for Norway, you know

One part of the game that deserves special mention is the JTF workshop, which basically allows you to let loose with your creative side. You can conjure up your own little version of merry hell on your own custom maps, and you can fiddle with topography, infrastructure and so on until you get a layout that you are pleased with, although the AI and mission objective sides of making your own maps is a bit more daunting, and sadly there’s no help file included within the editor itself.

The fat lady is clearing her throat, so its time for a few of the game's less pleasant aspects. One annoyance is that while you can call in a Predator UAV to expose the enemy presence in a remote area, you can’t then call in a cruise missile strike to eliminate those enemies unless you have another unit in close proximity, which more or less negates the point of a UAV in the first place.

Less annoying, but something of a missed opportunity is that the zoom function doesn’t let you zoom all the way in, which is a crying shame given how fine the visuals are. Yet one more complaint is that you don’t get to choose the order in which your engineers repair vehicles - they’ll always start with the most damaged first.

Possibly the most irritating aspect, however, is tied to the rock-paper-scissors dynamic and the 'cash for units' reinforcement system. If you blow all your cash on the wrong unit types and come up against, for example, a Hind when you have no AA capability, there's often no recourse to address your bad judgment other than a frustrating load of an earlier save point.

These are not game breaking points, however, and don't detract to any great extent from a reasonably solid addition to the RTS canon. It’s just a shame that the resource model aspect didn’t pan out quite as I’m sure the developer envisioned, while the handful of other little annoyances ensure that the gameplay never lives up to the excellent visuals. Still, there’s always a market for this heavily populated niche of RTS games, and maybe we’ll see a sequel that’ll address these issues just in time for Gulf War part 3.