Joint Task Force Hands-On

Have you heard about Joint Task Force before? No? Well, I have a dirty little secret to confess.

What the hell is that plane grinning about?

Joyride?

I was absolutely *convinced* JTF was a military first-person shooter. Don't even ask me why, because I am unable to give you a rational answer. I guess it's all those Delta Force games I've played over the years - JFT was branded before I even got to read the minimal recommended specs, let alone play the game.

To my surprise, after receiving a beta copy from VU Games a few days ago, I realized that JTF is in fact a real-time strategy game under development by Most Wanted Entertainment.

So now, I must set the record straight.

In case you're as clueless about the developer as I am (and apparently I am clueless about a lot of things, according to my wife), MWE are the guys behind Panzers: Phase One (2004), a title that does give them credibility as game designers.

In Joint Task Force, player takes on the role of a squad leader tasked with completing objectives in tomorrow's most hazardous conflicts. The single player game spans across twenty missions (broken apart in 5 campaigns) in volatile regions like the Middle East, East Africa, Central Asia, and the Balkans.

As its very title suggests, the design philosophy behind Joint Task Force was to drive the player to combine effectively all battlefield units - including infantry, tanks, artillery, reconnaissance and helicopters. The terrorists, militiamen and the guerilla fighters will be setting up traps and using the terrain to their advantage. Your orders as a commander are to accomplish the objectives with minimal casualties, while often being forced to show restraint due to heavy media coverage.

This sets the stage up quite nicely for an RTS game that has absolutely nothing to do with amassing of resources and base building - at least from what I've seen of the game in the first couple of missions.

If I had to compare Joint Task Force to any other RTS, then I'd definitely say that it plays a lot like the Commandos strategy series in the sense that each of your units will be important to the operation - even the standard Ranger unit. Some of your squad mates have special abilities and these will be paramount to clearing certain heavily defended areas, or getting out of perilous situations - reconnaissance skills or anti-tank weapons to name a few.

Playing the first couple of missions took some time to adjust to the game's play style. I was used to charging in and trying to get things done the classic RTS way - with superiority in numbers. In JTF, however, the numbers work against you, so you better plan ahead, and use armored vehicles and air support as much as you can.

In the first mission, I had to secure a boat in a dockyard in Mogadishu. The operation went smoothly for the most part, and I was thankful to have the medic unit with me. Granted, I had to move very slow as the fog of war would prevent me from charging into any situation, and even get a couple of rangers to mount a huge construction vehicle so as to provide mobile armor cover against the AA guns. While having to deal with a few armored pick-up trucks and the aforesaid AA guns, the mission went pretty smoothly in the third or fourth try.

It's in the second mission that things got pretty hairy. I had to clear an airport and secure a number of trucks trapped in a hangar, with refugees on board. Clearing the airport was tough enough, even with the support of two Humvees - one outfitted with an anti-armor weapon and the other with a high caliber machine gun - but when the enemy reinforcements started closing in on the airport my situation got pretty dire. During the "airport liberation," I managed to lose one of the Humvees. Needless to say, that came back to bite me in the ass when the baddies started swarming the place.

JTF uses the PhysX technology, which powers the physics. This naturally has a great impact on the gameplay itself. The destructible fully 3D terrain offered plenty of good tactical spots for my team (which seem to be predefined on each map), so spotting them in time might be the key to survival.

Granted, my brave squad got killed in the second mission and I didn't manage to save the civilians. It took me another couple of tries before I got it right (Again, my wife is not surprised one bit).