Tactical-Ops

For Unreal Tournament

Anyone familiar with the Half-Life mod, Counter-Strike (CT), will know instantly the inspiration for Tactical-Ops.

Tactical-Ops is a multiplayer game that pits Terrorists against Special Operatives. Each team has specific goals for each map and in order to accomplish these goals you have the opportunity to buy weapons, equipment and explosives at the start of each round. Does all of this sound familiar?

Anyone setting out to duplicate Counter-Strike’s success has their work cut out for them. Tactical-Ops (TO) looks very good (except for one vital area that will be explored later) and the sound is well done. Control is good – if you’ve mastered Unreal Tournament (UT) you’ll have no problems, but you should configure your keys beforehand. Things start to fall apart when you start playing.

One: very unforgiving gameplay. As a newbie, be ready to die within the first 30 seconds of each round you play for at least an hour. This has to do with the damage modeling. If a grenade goes off anywhere close to you, you’ll die – even if you’re loaded with armour. The blast radius is huge and doesn’t seem to be affected by by walls or other immovable objects. And headshots happen way too often. While the damage modeling may be closer to real life than CT, there’s a fine line between realism and fun – TO errs on the side of realism. Two: the muddy character models (especially on lower resolutions) are often confusing. On several occassions I walked up to a "friendly" thinking that we could team up, only to be blasted. Experienced players will be able to distinguish the subtle differences, but until you gain enough experience prepare to die a lot. Three: the dropped items hover above the ground. After finally nailing someone you’ll realize that something is very wrong – MP5s are immune to gravity. Bodies often take the reverse approach and imbed themselves into floors. And as you watch others, you will realize another quandry. The supporting hand on a sub-machine gun should not – I repeat, should not – be held six inches in front of the muzzle! But all the characters do it as if they were wishing they had an extra six inches on their gun. <Insert your own dirty joke here.> In short, there are a lot of clipping problems.

But flaws aside, there are some good things to say abour TO and a lot of promise shown. The shining diamond here, are the maps, which range from good to superb. A lot of the maps are geared toward smaller numbers of players with many areas to setup an ambush or sneaking around to get the drop on your opponent (or an all-out attack if you’ve got lots of players). But there are maps that encourage large skirmishes, too. Finding a good server is very easy to do via the menus in UT – same goes for GameSpy. Another positive is that there’s room for TO to get better. It’s a promising mod and it has a devoted following, so it’s likely to grow and mature – just as Counter-Strike did before it.

My final judgement it that UT owners should download Tactical-Ops if they haven’t already. If you can overlook the flaws (which isn’t hard after the first hour) you’ll enjoy yourself. It may not be as polished as Counter-Strike – yet – but it might be if it continues to improve.

Reviewed by Omni