A fun game that doesn't quite exceed the sum of its parts.
To get the most out of Dropteam you will need to read the manual. It is a 73-page black and white PDF. It is well laid out and helpful. The last 20 pages or so are dedicated to vehicle stats and setting up a server and Linux stuff so there are probably only 50 pages you really need to read. It does not take long. The section on the Tac screen and commanding units is probably the most important. The lack of color is disappointing but certainly not critical. My biggest complaint is the lack of a keyboard command table. One is available from within the game but it would have been nice to have one to print out.
Ok, so how is single player? Well first let's see what we can do. As a single player you can either play a single scenario/mission or the campaign. I have spent most of my time with the individual missions and have so far only played the first mission of the campaign. The campaing is essentially a bunch of the mission worlds tied together with a solid story – albeit a written story, no character 'acting' here. Your options for a mission are pick the world, i.e. location, that determines the terrain you will fight on. There are forest planets, desert, etc with different amounts of gravity and atmospheric density (which affect ballistics and movement). You can then choose from up to three types of play: Capture the Flag (CTF), Objective, or Territory. The goal of CTF is obvious, Objective missions are an attacker/defender scenario, and Territory missions have each side trying to attack/defend a 'complex' of buildings. There is also a fourth mission called 'Ogre'. Fans of Steve Jackson's ‘Ogre/GEV’ board games will be familiar with this. In an Orgre mission one side gets one massive vehicle and the other side has a bunch of units that have to try and kill it. Unfortunately, when I played it the one unit was just a regular unit. According to the Battlefront forums this feature will be added later.
Each scenario lasts a set amount of time, which you choose, from just a few minutes up to four hours max. What is odd is that the scenario ends IMMEDIATLY when the timer runs out. You'll be in the middle of a shot and, bang, game over. There is no warning or countdown timer either; although you can always see the remaining time during the game.
For each mission you also pick the friendly and enemy force count. You can pick the number of enemy 'bots' (units) from 1 to 24 and the number of friendly bots from 0 (no teammates) to 24. You can also set the Bot ability for each side from dumb to smart.
You then start the mission. Most missions begin with a deployment phase where your teammates will self deploy and you pick your unit and deploy. There are some variations here depending on the mission. In some missions the defender deploys then once the mission starts the attacker drops units in thus giving the defender time to prepare. The game's name, Dropteam, is first apparent here as your units all get deployed from a dropship. You have a good list of units you can deploy ranging from light scout units to heavy tanks and artillery plus defending units and engineer assets. There is NO infantry in the game of any kind. The Battlefront forums mention that infantry will be added sometime in a future update.
The mission starts once deployment is over. There is an overhead Tac screen you can use to issue orders to your friendly units (attack, defend, move to, call artillery, etc). Otherwise they will do their own thing. Overall the bots do an ok job but there is no AI coordination among friendly bots that I could detect. In the first campaign mission the bots made a number of mistakes. They milled about aimlessly, had trouble going to designated spots that were just down the road, and wasted tons of ammo on long distance shots. Thankfully in the scenario missions they seem to do a better job. All in all it is up to you to command them properly.. You also control a unit directly and can also take direct command of any friendly unit. Driving your vehicle uses basic FPS controls. You can hold the E key which puts you in gunner mode with multiple levels of zoom for your gun sight (depending on your vehicle). The problem here is you cannot really drive while in gunner mode (you can but it is mighty hard) so you either have to be stopped or let yourself run free while shooting. You can shoot in regular mode but it can sometimes be hard to tell if there are obstructions. In regular mode you can raise and lower your site level from a couple feet off the ground all the way up to maybe a few hundred feet off the ground. You can also go into observe mode where you have the freedom to fly all over the map. You don’t see unspotted enemies in this mode which is good even though you can go and see any place on the map.
The game has a good physics engine so you’ll bounce around rough terrain, tip over or slide on steep hills etc. Grav/hover vehicles are modeled and do an acceptable job of sliding around in turns, etc. The problem with movement though is two-fold; first there are no good sound indications of when you are pushing the edge so it is easy to go a little crazy and crash. More importantly there is no mass modeled. An example of the sort of problem this causes is that in one mission I was running down a road in my light, wheeled-scout vehicle and accidentally crashed into my teammate in his heavy, main battle tank. I knocked it off the road like it was a toy and suffered no ill effects myself. I have also knocked a supply dropship all over the place with the same vechicle. Obviously this is wrong. I also hope this is something they fix because it can lead to some really silly tactics, especially, I would guess, in multiplayer. Overall the driving physics are a bit ‘gamey’ and are similar to a FPS shooter and nothing like a simulation game. But for the type of game Dropteam is it is probably the proper balance.
The physics of combat is generally good. Projectiles take time to reach their targets (and with the bigger guns you can see the projectile arcing out) and you have to lead a moving target. Although for a sci-fi setting your firing aides are very weak. The biggest annoyance is with ranging and target leading. Your gun always ‘auto-ranges’ to what you are pointing at but does NOT display the current range nor does it compensate for target movement (like modern gun systems already do). Thus if you lay off a moving target to lead it the range gets messed up. You can switch to manual mode but this is really only practical when you are sitting still and I still have not figured out a good way to estimate range to a target other than shooting at it and spotting where the shots fall. This is a quick way to waste ammo and get yourself killed. Why they did not just choose to do what modern gun systems do now by letting you ‘lase’ a target for range I do not know. But this would have been far better than the manual range option. If they at least displayed what the auto-range was you could switch to manual with a better shot of hitting. But, for indirect fire manual ranging is handy. The generally sterile terrain makes spotting targets a bit too easy and this is made worse by info sharing of enemy locations that result in red enemy markers alerting you to enemy positions even when you can not directly see them. This provides a nice bit of sci-fi flavor but combined with the smallish maps detracts a bit from operational and even tactical surprise. Because you can often see enemy dropships landing in the distance you will rarely be surprised by enemy units. Lack of infantry units in the game is just odd. There is also no air support. The one transport dropship is supposed to have guns according to the manual but I could not get it to fire.
You can choose from various ammo types and vehicles have different armor thicknesses all around including from turret to hull. Thus flank shots and hulldown positions are wise things. Each vehicle also has various systems that can be damaged or destroyed including crew, tires/tracks, engine, etc. This is also where the dropships come in again. If you, or a teammate, need to be re-supplied with ammo, get damaged or destroyed (or just want a different unit) you can call down a dropship. Dropships can be shot down by the enemy so attacking enemy dropships becomes key as does defending your own or calling them down to a safe place. There is at least one bug here though. I lost an engine while next to a structure and when I called in a dropship it kept crashing into the structure. I finally had to kill myself to be able to start from a new spot.
The graphics are barely acceptable by today’s standards. Most FPS players will think they are pretty bad. But they are sufficient for the purpose of the game. Vehicle models are good but not great. Terrain has nuanced folds to hide in or go hulldown. There are also trees and vegetation to break up site lines. But none of it is anything you have not seen a few years ago. Overall it has a very sterile quality and does little to make you feel immersed in combat -- the lack of people, scattered structures, and real built-up areas really add to this sterile quality. Perhaps the biggest complaint is that the maps are just too small or perhaps movement too fast. The biggest map can be traversed in probably a minute or so in faster vehicles.
Sound is poor and probably a far bigger loss than the dated graphics. There are basic movement sounds that are of little help (and I have been playing with ALL sound options on) with play or ambiance. The occasional Bot chat is almost useless and unintelligible. You’ll get an ‘Am defending’ report and the like in a robotic voice. Combat sounds are ok but the game has a massive screen shake when shots land nearby that is a bit overdone. Things like damaging hits are not announced with any distinct sound and it is hard to tell when you have just been hit or hit and damaged. Sometimes you do not even realize you are damaged until you look at your status screen. Again, the general poor execution and quality of sound provides no help in the immersion department.
With just a few units on each side I think the game is rather boring. Units move so quickly and dropping new units happens fast enough that it comes down to who is the better gunner or has the most armor. Destroyed units are also replaced too quickly. It is with larger missions that things get more interesting and the game starts to come into its own. Using the Tac view you can command all the units in the game as well as jump among them to take control. With a command unit in play you can call down artillery strikes, including smoke, and drop sensors and defensive units (gun, anti-aircraft platforms, etc). You can set what units get dropped where but when they get dropped seems to simply be when they get killed except for the unit you are currently controlling. This makes it hard to coordinate actions. There is a limit to the number of each type of unit that can be deployed so you have to be judicious with your drops. You can set ‘formations’. You would expect this to mean you could select some units and choose ‘wedge’ formation or something. Actually it just means that the selected units will maintain their current relative positions. So you have to order them into positions first or take direct control. This is rather clunky. A big problem for single player mode is that the game does NOT pause when issuing orders so you have to be quick about things. The game does pause when you bring up the options menu but you cannot issue any orders in this mode.
It is the Tac view where the game becomes especially fun but also where the games general rough edges and lack of polish are most annoying. First, just getting around the Tac view is annoying. It always starts with the full view of the map. You can only zoom into the center of the map then you have to maneuver the view around with the move controls. This is annoying when you want to just zoom in on a particular spot. Not being able to move the map with the mouse and zoom in on a spot you click on is very clunky. The map detail is generally insufficient to properly place or position units. Thus it is hard to tell where the edge of a cliff is, edge of wood line begins, or where a particular fold in the terrain is from looking at the Tac map even when zoomed all the way in. This forces a lot of flipping back and forth or forces you to take direct control of a unit. Also even in single player you have to vote yourself the commander to perform certain functions. There are also no real map based alerts to help you notice when certain things happen although you do see units’ fire and dropship appearances. In general it is confusing to understand what is happening sometimes and results in a lot of annoying micromanagement. It is very tough to do this and manage all the various dropping units as well.
In the Objective mission all of your troops drop on their own and with what they decide. You then have to madly go around and reassign things because there is no ability to give orders while paused (at least that I’ve been able to figure out). If there is a way to change this I have not figured it out yet. Another issue is that in the manual there is a tip for using a command vehicle. The problem is whenever you take control of a unit and then leave it for another it reverts to automatic computer control. Thus, in the case of the command unit if you want it out of the way you give it a stop order. When you need to use it you take control. But then when you leave it again you have to go back and give it a stop order again or the computer will probably start moving it somewhere on its own. It would be nice if the computer remembered the last order the unit was given or allowed you to give an order that would take effect when you left the unit. Again, the inability to issues orders while paused means that it is difficult to enjoy what could be the best part of the game. These various issues add up to an experience that feels like Dropteam was designed for multiplayer and then some allowance was made for single player after the fact.
Overall it is not a bad game. It just is not a great game either. If you plan to play multiplayer I suspect it will be more fun than single player. That is not to say single player does not have its fun moments and challenges but just do not expect too much. Dropteam perhaps suffers from the sum of its parts not adding up to a greater whole.