Given the success of Battlefield series of games, it was only a matter of time before another publisher would challenge EA's franchise. With Joint Operations: Typhoon Rising, NovaLogic has unleashed what it hopes is a Battlefield killer. NovaLogic does have a long history of producing military-themed action games, though it has never done a multiplayer-focused game on the scale of Joint Operations. We've been playing Joint Operations since its release earlier this week, but we wanted to share some of our early impressions with you while we're busy working on the full review.

Though there are no air-to-air missiles, you can still try to shoot down enemy helicopters using miniguns and anything else at your disposal.

Joint Operations is set in modern-day Indonesia. An insurgency threatens to destabilize one of the world's most populous nations, so the Indonesian government has invited Western special operations forces to conduct Joint Operations against the rebels. Thus, the table is set with Western and pro-government forces on one side and rebels on the other. As a member of Joint Operations, you can play as a Delta Force commando, a US Army Ranger, a German KSK commando, a Russian Spetznatz commando, and more. A number of these options allow you to select different skins, or appearances, and a few even have different genders, so you can play as a male or female Army Ranger. The insurgents are composed of Indonesian ex-military and separatists, and there are also a number of different skins and voices available for them.

Like in other team-based multiplayer shooters, Joint Operations allows you to play a number of different classes, which determines the weapons and equipment you'll have access to. The most ubiquitous is the rifleman, who gets a wide range of assault rifles as well as access to antitank rockets. The gunner gets to select the machine gun, which is useful for laying down suppressive fire. The engineer blows things up and gets either the mortar or the Stinger antiaircraft missile, which is very useful for knocking the myriad helicopters in the game from the sky. The sniper has access to, well, sniper rifles, and the medic rounds things out by being able to heal and revive fallen comrades.

There are a couple of things to note about classes and skins. The first is that while there are pilot-specific skins, any player can jump into any vehicle and pilot it--even helicopters. There's essentially no difference at all between playing a US Navy SEAL engineer and a British SAS engineer, aside from your character's appearance and voice. With that said, it's important to take into account the amount of weight your character carries. You can have a light, normal, or heavy level of encumbrance depending on the weapons and ammunition you carry. Of course, the heavier your load, the slower you'll run. Thankfully, the game allows you to tweak your weapon and ammo loads, so you can choose to forgo heavier weapons to gain additional speed, or you can reduce your ammo loads for each weapon to go from a heavy encumbrance to a normal one. You may even go into battle with a maximum loadout, and as you burn through ammunition, your encumbrance will lighten. As a consequence, you'll pick up speed. This allows you to tailor your character to your play style. You get to determine whether you want to pack light (so that you can move through the jungle quickly) or heavy (so that you are carrying enough weaponry to take out anything that crosses your path).

Every vehicle can carry passengers, and it's usually best to get as many as possible to maximize the firepower on board.

OK, once you've gotten your character and weapons all sorted out, it's time to jump into the game itself. To get you acclimated, Joint Operations includes a series of training missions where you'll learn how to employ the various weapons, use vehicles and helicopters, and defend and seize objectives. We suggest that you take up the more advanced training missions, even if you're a first-person-shooter veteran, because here you can learn the nuances of the game. But aside from the single-player training missions, the rest of Joint Operations is multiplayer-only. NovaLogic packs a variety of multiplayer game modes into Joint Operations, including cooperative gameplay, team deathmatch, team king of the hill, and advance and secure.