E3 06: Joint Task Force Preshow Impressions

The biggest convention in the game industry is coming up soon, so it follows logically that we'd be taking an advance look at an upcoming tactical strategy game that chronicles the adventures of an antiterrorist squad. Joint Task Force from developer HD Interactive and publisher VU Games will put you in control of the titular, fictitious squad of elite soldiers who have been assembled to deal with international threats that UN peacekeepers weren't able to handle. Over the course of the game, you'll fight through campaigns in some of the most dangerous and infamous regions of the world in recent memory, including Iraq, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Columbia.

Since the game will focus more on tactical deployment of a squad of soldiers rather than building up a war effort, you won't be chopping wood or mining gold. Instead, your primary resource will be cold, hard cash, which you'll use to commission new soldiers and vehicles to your army, and to outfit your current troops. However, you'll also want to carefully manage your troops' reputation in the public eye, since several of the flash points your team will visit will also be home to civilian buildings and hostages, whom you'll be encouraged to rescue and protect. If you can preserve the safety and property of innocent bystanders, you'll earn credibility with major news networks (which will occasionally send roving reporters with you in the field). That credibility translates into more of the world's nations signing on to sponsor the Joint Task Force, which means more funding and better gear for your squad. However, if you're negligent about the safety of innocents, you'll get a lot of bad press, which will cause member nations to pull out of the coalition, in addition to subsequent drops in your funding.

Much of the action will take place in small-scale skirmishes with soldiers you'll want to carefully preserve so that they can eventually gain experience levels to learn new combat skills. You'll also be able to purchase new armament for your troops between missions (or scrounge for them within missions from weapon caches or fallen enemies), so over time, your squad will become a persistent investment of your time and skills that will pay off in a stronger, more-skillful group you can carry across different missions and even different campaigns. The most experienced soldiers that advance to level four will become hero units, which can have very different specializations as medics, snipers, or other types of troops. In later missions in the single-player game, you'll only be able to add a certain number of heroes to your forces, so you'll want to be smart about how you develop your heroes.

We had a chance to watch a few different missions in action in various parts of the world. The game will include about 20 different single-player campaign missions, but these will take place in vast overland maps divided into sizable sectors that will become unlocked as you complete each of your missions. You'll be required to perform primary missions such as rescuing captured towns from hostile militia or neutralizing missile silos, though you'll also encounter optional "side" missions, such as to ensure that hostages get safely picked up by a UN convoy (and then to defend the convoy as it makes its way to a drop zone).

Apparently, HD Interactive intends to make customization a big part of the game, since you'll not only customize your troops in single-player with different skills and equipment, but you'll also be able to customize your multiplayer experience. Producer Vincent van Diemen explained that although the game will include standard modes like basic head-to-head competition, it will also include "a huge list of parameters and victory conditions that can be toggled on and off, and saved in different custom configurations," similar to the online options in the first-person shooter Halo (which also let you set custom rules for your online matches and save your favorites). There aren't quite as many small-scale tactical strategy games these days as there once were, so if HD Interactive can make good on the game's potential, Joint Strike Force will offer fast-paced tactical strategy in realistic battles that could've been ripped from the headlines. The game is scheduled for release later this year.