By The Stratos Group
Design by James Cheung

Although it’s only been a year and a half or so since Battlefield 1942 first hit the shelves, its formula - with the double whammy of easily-controllable vehicles and some potent team-based gameplay modes - became an instant classic, and now it’s fairly difficult to imagine online gaming without it. But although BF1942 has seen a couple of expansion packs, a follow-up (Battlefield: Vietnam), and an imposing number of modifications, we’re just now seeing the first wave of imitators. Soldner has already hit stores, Star Wars: Battlefront is coming this fall, and the first true sequel, Battlefield 2, should be arriving early next year. Amidst all of this, Novalogic, the developer of the hit game Black Hawk Down, is throwing its hat into the ring with the modern-combat simulation Joint Operations: Typhoon Rising.

The laundry list of features in Joint Ops will be familiar to anyone who’s played a Battlefield game: you can play as one of five distinct classes, have a couple dozen different vehicles at your beck and call, and engage in some fierce battles over control points scattered across the map. The game does attempt to stand out from the crowd in a few areas, though, most noticeably in the size of games. Thanks to the fact that Novalogic has its own servers and hosts many of the Internet games that are ongoing at any given time, they were able to build the game from the ground up to include many more players than most online FPS’ ever see - up to 150 on the same server. To accommodate these large games, they’ve crafted some incredibly huge maps, with some spanning as much as nine kilometers from one end to another.

But, even if you’ve never played a game like this before, GameSpot is here to help. Our guide to Joint Operations will give you a run-down on the game’s myriad weapons, vehicles, and maps, with tips on how to play each class and how to survive in the wild jungles of Indonesia.

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