
	Platform PC Genre Real-Time Strategy Publisher Sierra Developer HD Publishing ESRB M (Mature) Released September 2006

- For those that a just a wee tired of World War II and/or sci-fi “What if…?” scenarios - Very detailed environments - Concentration on smaller groups of troop movement - A different take on resource management

- Over-the-top voice acting leeches some of the “realistic” mood - In tight spaces vehicles and infantry can get “stuck” - Most missions require a slow approach

Review: Perimeter: Emperor's Testament (PC) Review: Poxnora (PC) Review: Act of War: Direct Action (PC) Review: Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle Earth II (PC)
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Joint Task Force

Score: 7.0 / 10

The development team working on Joint Task Force (JTF) went all-out to bring realism to their real-time strategy. Using a modern day setting, JTF features recognizable modern military vehicles and weapons and puts them in a world so rife with detail the box recommends a Pentium 4 3.0Ghz or higher with a bunch of high-end hardware, including a PhysX physics card.

JTF puts you in control of small groups of soldiers and inserts you in various world hotspots to combat a quasi-Al Queda threat with all the latest military hardware. It’s a kinetic environment – there’s not a lot of base building in the traditional real-time strategy sense. Reinforcements can be brought in when control is established at air centers or radar stations, the cost of which is borne by your very strict cash levels which is earned on the battlefield by completing objectives and by doing good deeds in front of the media, like killing bad guys while the cameras roll. It works within the context of the game because resource gathering in a modern theater of war doesn’t make much sense. It forces the player to more careful; troops rushing pell-mell all over the map is not the path to victory when a misstep can force you to restart or reload a save game because you’re out of money and out of troops. (JTF includes a quicksave/quickload feature – that should tell you something.)

Keeping troops alive allows them to “level-up” and become somewhat of a hero unit, which can be further upgraded and provide bonuses to themselves and those close to them.

Though the campaign could be labeled “short” it’s by no means easy. Victories are hard won and those expecting the more fast-paced action of traditional

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real-time strategy games might be disappointed in the amount of downtime between strikes. Advancement is slow most of the time, with few opportunities to just race toward a goal. Usually you’ll hit a small terrorist strike force then break-out the engineers to repair the vehicles and let the combat medics heal the infantry. At times it’s laborious, but the cash

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flow situation practically dictates an approach that’s over-cautious (even if the sporadic and almost unpredictable enemy guerilla strikes didn’t).

Pathfinding is the real-time strategies biggest enemy. A game could have everything else, but if it doesn’t have competent pathfinding (i.e. your troops will show up in the area you click on without walking into a machine gun nest) the RTS community will rail against the game. For the most part JTF has a stable pathfinding AI, as long as things don’t get too tight. Vehicles will move forward and reverse to get into proper position to have a clear path – usually things sort themselves out. But there are times when units get bunched together and clog up the path, making further movement impossible, at least, until you untangle things. This happens most often with infantry units, but when it does happen it’s not a happy time. They can be arranged in a token number of preset formations, but the player can also set their own formations then select the group and send them out – they’ll stay in that formation as best they can.

Basic infantry intelligence could have been made better. Many of the mission environments feature areas where infantry can take cover (behind sandbags, burned out cars, etc.) but unless you manually click them into position, they won’t dive for that cover if they’re close. To their credit they do drop to the prone position.

To say the voice work for the units and mission briefings is “wildly erratic” would be an understatement. For all the realism that JTF strives for on the battlefield, the voices come off as wild parodies of war film bravado. Clicking on the same unit a number of times will illicit different responses, each with a different accent. It may be nitpicking, but when a game includes support for a physics card to get the kinetic motion of flying bodies correct, I’d expect at least average voice acting.

Blowing through the single-player campaign, though complete, is thankfully backed-up by multiplayer options, which don’t necessarily blunt things like “clogged pathfinding” but it’s always a hoot to play against human beings.

It’s not as if the real-time strategy genre is wanting for games. There are plenty of titles out there and with competition from the likes of the very well received Company of Heroes, JTF has stiff competition. Its presentation and slick detail are a credit to the developers, but the often laborious pace will put off those seeking more intensity in their RTS offerings.

- Omni

(October 3, 2006)