Joint Task Force Hands-On - Heroes, Weapons, Combat, and More

Gamers looking to get their hands on Joint Task Force won't have to wait much longer. This real-time strategy game is currently scheduled to ship in early September, but we took one last look at it during Sierra's recent press event and are pleased with the way it's turning out.

Anyone who's played Command & Conquer: Generals or Act of War will likely be familiar with the basic world outlook of Joint Task Force. In it, the G8 nations form a smaller joint army, similar to that of the UN peacekeepers but with a bit more of an aggressive bent and less bureaucratic overhead, specifically to deal with terrorist threats. The game takes place in 2008, but you won't be playing around with any crazy future technology here; almost every unit in the game is licensed off from real-world equipment manufacturers, such as Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and other players in the high-stakes world of national security and defense technologies.

We played the first few levels of the single-player campaign, all of which take place from the perspective of the JTF forces, which are commanded on the field by Major O'Connell, a hard-edged soldier who'll earn experience as you play. You'll be able to use multiple hero units throughout the game, but O'Connell will be the only one that accompanies you on every mission. Hero units possess a number of interesting abilities, including the ability to call in for air-dropped light armor or infantry backups, but they also unlock more skills as they fight in combat. These skills and experience are persistent throughout the campaign, so you'll be able to tailor your gameplay experience to your liking early on. The catch is that if O'Connell dies, your game is over, so you'll have to protect him as best you can.

What's interesting is that any of your individual soldiers or other troops can be promoted to hero status when they've fought through their share of battles. There are a number of different specialized troop units that are available to you, each of which has their own specific roles to play. Engineers are responsible for repairing vehicles; vehicle crews control your tanks and Humvees; pilots fly your choppers and jets; and so on. Most of these roles are interchangeable, but if you place a pair of rangers into a tank and tell them to drive it around, you can expect them to be less accurate with their fire than if a pair of vehicle crewmen, for instance, piloted that same tank. Specialists are required for most operations, but they'll definitely be more effective in their assigned roles than any general-purpose soldier.

Anyway, if one of these grunts sticks through enough battles, you'll eventually be able to promote him up to hero status. The point here is that each type of hero will have different skills to learn, based on their previous occupation. Soldiers, like O'Connell, can become more skilled with handheld weapons, for instance, or can grant defense or offense bonuses to all nearby soldiers. Doctor heroes will be able to more quickly heal nearby units; vehicle crew heroes will be able to deal more damage to tanks or automatically detect mines from inside their vehicles; snipers will become able to ignore cover or gain instant headshots; and ace pilots will gain bonuses against other air units, or will even be able to increase the fighting ability of all friendly aircraft in the zone of conflict.

Of course, you're going to need to use these hero units to their full effect, as even on its default difficulty level, Joint Task Force seems as though it'll be a challenging game. The traditional rock-paper-scissors system of the real-time strategy genre is in full effect here, so you'll have to manage your different tactical groups as best you can, using your choppers to take out masses of infantry, then pulling them out and sending in your tanks when you encounter Stinger-equipped enemies, then using your own infantry when your tanks run into antitank soldiers. More than once we ran across an enemy antiair unit with our infantry squad, which quickly cut down our hero unit and forced us to reload our game. Caution is the name of the game here.

That said, the game rewards you for using your brain. In the very first mission, for example, you'll come across one of these antiair cannons that blocks your path toward your destination. Since you'll control only a small number of infantry, you can attempt to get close to it and use grenades to knock out the soldiers, but you'll likely lose a few of your troops in the process. The cannon has 360 degrees of aiming, so it's impossible to flank, but if you retreat a bit, you can commandeer a car or truck to knock down a set of fences nearby, which in turn allows you to access a hangar where a tank lays in store. You can use the tank to clear a path to your destination much more easily than you would've been able to do had you approached the mission in a straightforward fashion; we're hoping some of the other 19 missions in the game's five campaigns are going to reward this kind of out-of-the-box thinking, as well.

Fans of online real-time strategy adventures are also going to find plenty to like in Joint Task Force. Although the campaigns focus only on the JTF forces, online games will also let you control one of the other two armies in the game. One of these is based on an unnamed Balkan nation and consists of larger numbers of units that are somewhat technically inferior to the JTF, while the other is a terrorist faction that presumably relies on sneaky, underhanded attacks to nullify the technological sophistication of the other factions. There are plenty of customizable gametypes, allowing game hosts to disable almost any specific aspect of the game they wish. There are also plenty of odd game rules, such as armageddon, which destroys all of the vehicles on the map at a specific time, or danger zone, which lets you start with a large map that periodically shrinks down until only a few zones are left.

In addition to the normal multiplayer chaos, the game also supports cooperative play online or over a local area network, allowing two players to share resources and control the same units. This isn't an option in most real-time strategy games, so we're looking forward to seeing how it works out. All in all, Joint Task Force is looking like it should be another interesting entry in the crowded real-time strategy marketplace. Will its unique features be enough to set it apart from its competition? We'll have to wait until it launches in early September to see for sure.