Combining vehicle combat with first-person action is a natural progression for action games with even vaguely military themes. It's a rare war movie that doesn't have jeeps or trucks somewhere in the picture, since it's hard to expect lead characters to hoof it in every scene. But there's a short list of recent first-person shooters that have managed to add vehicles to the mix. Tribes 2, Halo, and Operation Flashpoint are the only ones that stand out, and Halo isn't even on the PC yet. Mobile Forces, from UK-based Rage Software, is a game focused on rectifying this deficit, adding vehicles and large environments to the Unreal Tournament formula.

This arctic map is so big, you'll want to hitch a ride, but at least there's some scenery--like this attack sub--to watch along the way.

Mobile Forces bears more than a passing resemblance to Unreal Tournament. Rage licensed the Unreal engine for the game, and included some of the engine's more recent features, such as support for rolling terrain. However, the detail level of the graphics looks much more like the original UT than the upcoming Unreal Tournament 2003. Although basic deathmatch is included, Mobile Forces is a multiplayer team game at its core. The teams are divided into rather generic red and blue sides, and since the single-player game is limited to playing against bots, there's no story or setting except what you can discern from individual maps. The weapons and vehicles may be inspired visually by familiar military equipment but, fitting with the game's fast-action style, there's little attempt to model real-world specifics.

A basic inventory system limits how many of the game's six weapons and four items you can carry at a time. Every player has six inventory slots, and weapons take up one to five of these, balanced by the weapon's power. The bulkiest weapons are understandably the machine gun and the rocket launcher. The rocket launcher has more or less a single purpose: to stop vehicles in their tracks. The slow reload and 10-shot magazine keeps it specialized. The machine gun is even bigger than the standard-issue M60 .50 cal seen in any number of games, and can't be fired unless it's set down on its tripod. This static gun can dish out a ton of damage at close range, and is one of the better choices to take out vehicles. The four anti-personnel weapons are obvious choices--semi-auto pistol, assault rifle, shotgun, and sniper rifle--and work pretty much as you'd expect. To keep the sniper rifle somewhat balanced, there's a laser sight that gives away the sniper's position, and sniper shots are most effective when you hold down the fire button for some time.

Mobile Forces' main draw is its inclusion of vehicles, which lack offensive power unless a teammate shoots from the top.

The game's diverse environments mean that it's useful to have more than one weapon, but the items share the same limited inventory space, so you can't have everything. In addition to basic armor and a portable health kit, you can choose from a frag grenade or trip mines. Not only do the trip mines have a laser wire to make them good for closing off narrow corridors, but they have an alternate mode that lets you throw them on the ground to slow down vehicles.

What makes Mobile Forces interesting is its vehicles. Obviously, a lot of effort is going into the vehicle physics. The fast vehicles, the dune buggy and humvee, feel like they're straight out of an arcade-style driving game, and it's fun just to drive them around the levels. The bouncy suspension is quite forgiving and a number of maps have ramps and obstacles that you can jump off for some decent airtime. There's no vehicle damage for careening into obstacles or other vehicles, but tires can be shot out, which seriously affects handling. One of the more effective uses of vehicles is to mow down enemies in open spaces. Most troops are very vulnerable to oncoming vehicles, but the dune buggy and slow-moving covered truck leave the driver exposed to regular rifle shots, and all vehicles but the APC expose the passengers to small-arms fire. However, it's nearly impossible to run over a deployed machine gunner and survive. Direct damage to the vehicles, even the APC, seems to directly count down the driver's armor and health, so it's not just a matter of jumping out unscathed.