People often bemoan the fact that there are more war-orientated RTS games out there than you can comfortably shake a stick at, while simultaneously calling for more and more, demanding that each one be prettier and more exciting than the last and offer more than your stereotypical game of constant resource harvesting. Lately, with the likes of Dawn of War, Faces of War and the spanking new Company of Heroes we’ve been getting new visceral twists and novel features in spades, and Joint Task Force fits neatly into this trend.
Before I go ahead and pull things apart I want to make a very important point that you might forget later on. JTF is absolutely gorgeous. You will need the burliest of monster machines (including the right-now-complete-waste-of-money Ageia PhysX card) to get the most out of it, but boy is this game pretty. This reviewer’s machine was utterly unable to cope with all visual settings maxed out, but in the brief few moments before the game juddered to a halt I got treated to some real eye candy. And this, conveniently, leads me to my first criticism of this title. Its minimum specs are totally taking the piss. I have fond memories of persuading DOOM 3 to run on 512Mb of RAM and a GeForce 2, or coaxing Dawn of War into life on the same aged rig before I laid it to rest and bought a new one. I was willing to compromise graphical greatness to just play those games, and they played well. Playing JTF on anything less than a healthy cut above the recommended specs is simply not an option. This doesn’t matter so much if you have a respectable system, but if you like to chance your arm (as I used to) with the bare essentials you can forget about it with this title.
And there’s a great game lurking in here, make no mistake. JTF tries very hard for that “real” feeling. Gone are the staples of base-building and resource collection – instead you requisition units with cash earned by completing mission objectives. Infantry reinforcements and Humvees are flown in by sleek-looking Blackhawks, while you’ll need to capture a local airstrip to bring in big guns like artillery and tanks. Basic Rangers are relatively cheap, but you’ll find yourself needing to spend an entire objective’s worth of wonga on a single armoured unit in some of the missions. Your basic troops are surprisingly versatile, able to pack all manner of hardware including tank busting RPGs, night vision goggles and C4 explosives provided you can get them to an FRSV (a mobile supply vehicle, loaded with engineers). Apache helicopters, A10 Warthogs and the odd cruise missile are available, but these toys come with their own hefty price tag too.
The way the system is set up makes you very protective of what troops you do have on the battlefield and makes you fret over how you use them, but it also leads to what is probably the biggest flaw in the game. War in JTF is horrendously expensive, and often times it’s a tough choice between spending your dwindling bucks on replacing the tank you just lost in battle or in keeping the rest of your army adequately supplied to carry on the fight. Time and time again you’ll end up simply being unable to afford units necessary to accomplish your objectives and you’ll be forced to reload from an earlier save. To compound this actual combat can be very unforgiving, your men having the survival potential of a whelk in supernova if caught in the open or faced down by enemy armour. It’s a challenge, certainly, but I found myself reloading after every minor scrap to see if I could win it while losing as few troops as possible. It becomes habitual, almost compulsive, and it mars whatever flow and momentum the game builds up and can easily sap the fun right out of a gaming session.
This is a shame because there is the potential for so much enjoyment here. This is a wonderfully detailed RTS, and there’s considerable delight to be had in choosing and tweaking the equipment for your various soldiers. The same goes for your vehicles, the humble Humvee having the choice of three different turret armaments alone (The fact that it’s as useful as a wet paper bag is neither here nor there). Each vehicle has its own dedicated crew that you can swap out at will, and they’ll even bail when their steed is wrecked and carry on the fight with their rifles. You can commandeer enemy units, and even civilian vehicles, with any troop unit in the game. You’ve got plenty of choice, and that should mean plenty of fun.
I must confess that after my first session with Joint Task Force I was going to award it a top score. It makes a fantastic first impression, but with each replay the flaws just become more apparent. For all its tactical choices JTF never requires you to get tactical, and this is largely down to the A.I. and level design. Nine times out of ten the enemy will simply charge at your guns. I never once witnessed an attempt at a flank manoeuvre, or a retreat, or some glimmer of intelligence to suggest that these were, in fact, soldiers I was fighting and not zombies. Your own men are a little on the thick side too, but at least they don’t stand around in open ground while under sniper fire, or stand blithely blazing away in front of an advancing M1A1 Abrams tank with nothing but an AK47 and a smile. Levels are usually a case of: go here, then there, and finally there, and kill everything you meet on the way. It’s straightforward stuff that still manages a fair level of difficulty, which is no bad thing, but it becomes repetitive, almost predictable.
And then we come to the biggest problem of all: Should you buy it? A week ago my answer would have been a firm, but cautious, ‘yes’. Joint Task Force is a good game and if (like me) RTS is your thing than it is worth picking up. But you see, I recently laid my hands on the demo for Company of Heroes, and I had more fun in that hour than I did the entire time I was playing JTF. It’s not the best, it’s not the cleverest, it’s certainly not the most fun and if there’s only one RTS game you can to buy this year Joint Task Force is definitely not it. But… well damn it, I still like it. It tries hard, and is a million miles better than most of the tripe in this overcrowded market, and for that it gets a recommendation.
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