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Realism can be both a blessing and a curse for a strategy game. When an RTS isn't set in the distant future or some fantasy version of the past, a realistic take on modern warfare is a requirement. On paper, it appears that developer Most Wanted and their new title, Joint Task Force, are set up for a perfectly realized take on war today. They certainly made an effort. The game features modern military equipment licensed from major producers and a campaign spanning today's war zones, including Somalia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Columbia and ultimately Iraq. Yet, from the start terrible design choices render this title a realistically futile pursuit.
JTF doesn't feature any base building. Rather it's designed around a goal oriented, cash-based system. Accomplishing mission tasks nets you some greenbacks to spend on troops and light vehicles. If you capture an airfield along the way, heavy equipment can be flown to your location. The problem with this semi-realistic approach is that you don't know what's coming, and your limited cash funds often boil the strategy aspect down to a game of guess and check. You end up replaying an entire mission once or twice, after marching an ill-equipped squad to their death. You can be rolling right along, breezing through a mission when suddenly you're overwhelmed by attack helicopters and you have no cash and no anti-aircraft support to defend yourself. With no method of obtaining additional resources, you'll have no choice but to load up an old save. Not knowing an enemy's strength might be a realistic fact of modern warfare but it doesn't make for a whole lot of fun.
As a result, the best possible strategy is to use heavy armor and maintain it well, especially since you can't afford the cost of losing it. While it's simple enough to do, it's extremely slow to execute. You will spend forever waiting for your engineers to repair your vehicles before you push ahead with your assault. You can use a double speed button to quicken the pace, but it still takes so long you can do some online shopping while you wait. It's painful when the strategy of an RTS boils down to "repair, repair, repair."
When you tell your units to get moving and they respond with a shout of "we'll see," they really mean it.
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JTF compounds its weak strategy with a common sin among RTS titles – bad path finding. Actually, at times it features downright awful path finding. When you're spending all your money on armor you can create a terrible traffic jam, especially in the crowded city streets of several missions. Several times I'd order my units to move ahead and attack a terrorist outpost only to see half the squad make it there, while the rest were jockeying for position back where I left them. I eventually took to micromanaging my tanks, feeling more like a parking attendant than military commander. When you tell your units to get moving and they respond with a shout of "we'll see," they really mean it.
Like many strategy games, there's an effort to create and cultivate heroes in the single player campaign, with the main focus on your leader, Commander O'Connell. Heroes are upgradeable with various skills at your disposal as you progress through the missions. However, the game shoots itself in the foot by requiring your heroes to remain alive for the duration of the campaign. If your hero gets blasted to bits by a tank shell, your mission is over. The result is that you either leave your hero out of the fray to ensure that he doesn't die, or have him ride inside some serious protection, like a tank. If the tank goes down it's a mad scramble to get him to safety. The problem is that O'Connell and others propel the story forward during cutscenes, so the necessity of keeping them alive feels artificial. It's not very realistic to believe that a mission to protect the world from terrorist activity would fail, even if the commander fell to enemy fire.
There are countless other mysterious design choices, including the censoring of the harsh language of your soldiers. In a game focusing on realistic warfare bleeped out cursing stands out as wholly inaccurate. Why include swearing in the dialogue of the cutscenes at all? JTF does attempt to bring in some commentary on the media's role in modern warfare, but it does so without much effect. You get a meter about whether you're retaining positive or negative television coverage, but ultimately it doesn't really have much effect on the gameplay. Commentary on the sensitive relationship between the military and media doesn't really pan out anyway when the media sells out their journalistic integrity late in the game to help the military out.
A failed single player campaign isn't necessarily a death knell for an RTS, though, as multiplayer can sometimes salvage it. Unfortunately, that's not the case here. The adversarial modes play kind of like a poor man's Company of Heroes, with flag captures getting you cash for more equipment. Yet, with no base at all to defend in JTF, multiplayer essentially becomes a scenario-based expansion of the single player. Grab some cash, whip out some units and kill you enemy as quick as possible. Thankfully most of the matches don't last long enough to worry about repairs, and you're not likely to run out of money anyway. Still, without bases or legitimate resources to worry about, it lacks of any real depth and merely serves as a reminder that there are several other RTS titles out more worthy of your time. On the bright side, though, JTF features co-op campaign play so that you can share your misery with a friend, or at least have someone to chat with while you wait for your units to repair.
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