In an attempt to steal the spotlight for online gaming spotlight from Battlefield 1942/Vietnam, Novalogic has just released Joint Operations: Typhoon Rising, a new foray into the FPS genre that looks a bit average on first glance, but opens up to reveal a much more intense and exciting game that might just topple the Battlefield series from the top rungs – at least until the new BF sequel comes out. Joint Operations: Typhoon Rising focuses on the war-torn sectors of Indonesia, where a Rebel movement is trying to force their way into power and do whatever it is crazy rebels do when they decide to get a few guns and start shooting stuff. On station to save the day is a large Joint Operations force of assorted nationalities, armed with the best military hardware they are able to muster and the task of driving out the Rebels from Indonesia once and for all. Put in basic terms, Joint Ops is a modern-day battlefield game with good guys and bad guys trying to shoot the crap out of each other over a variety of environments, which is probably a good enough introduction for most people.

The game bears a striking resemblance to Delta Force: Black Hawk Down in many regards (including several weapon models and the general HUD design), but a major difference is that the game is almost entirely focused on multiplayer action. Booting up the game, several offline scripted tutorials are available to thoroughly acquaint players with each and every aspect of play (from different types of vehicles and weapons to actual gameplay objectives), but beyond that, everything is set up for multiplayer access. The first and best place to start is the player setup screen, where a name can be entered, preferred faction chosen (Joint Ops or Rebels), and player classes determined. The game offers five major player classes; Medic, Sniper, Engineer, Gunner, and Rifleman, and each class affects what kind of weapons and strategic options the player will have available. The Medic is the only one capable of healing or reviving a fallen comrade in the field for example, while Engineers are the only ones who can carry guided anti-aircraft missile launchers or deployable mortar cannons. I’ll get back to the specifics on these (and other) weapons in a bit, but once a class and weapons configuration has been chosen (and a player skin and voice pack selected, if an extra step of personalization is wanted), the next logical step is to hop online through the “Novaworld” service to go hunt down a server and get in on the action.

There are several gameplay modes available in Joint Ops, with the most prominent being “Advance and Secure”. Sharing a startling resemblance to Unreal Tournament 2004’s “Onslaught” mode of gameplay, AAS revolves around a set of linked bases on the map, waiting to be occupied in a specific manner. As one based is secured by a team, the next is unlocked for an attack to be mounted. Unlike UT2k4’s Onslaught mode, however, there are no magical power nodes to construct or destroy – rather, force in numbers is what is required to conquer an objective. An indicator on the HUD displays how many friendly and enemy units are currently within the occupation zone of a given base, with a cute little flag icon denoting how much progress is being made in the capture operation. If the attacking forces outnumber the defending players around a given base, the flag will lower accordingly until it hits bottom, in which case the base will go neutral until the assaulting team is able to bring a flag of their own color up to the top of the pole (done simply by staying in the occupation zone). However, if the defenders manage to hang in long enough for others to reinforce them, the battle over the positioning of the flag can quickly turn into a kind of tug-of-war, with both teams trying to cram enough men into the base to turn the flag in their favor.

King of the Hill is the one of only other interesting gameplay modes Joint Ops has to offer, but it delivers a good experience nonetheless. As would be expected, KOTH tasks two teams with trying to assault a central base and occupy it for the longest of times. As long as a team has at least one player inside of the base’s occupation zone, their timer will increase, but if that last soldier is killed or wanders out of the area, the timer will reset to zero. Obviously the team with the most time logged by the end of the mission wins. The final noteworthy gameplay mode worth mentioning (team deathmatch is also available, for times when you just want to repeatedly shoot at things mindlessly) is co-op play. Interestingly enough, while Joint Ops doesn’t have any kind of singleplayer campaign, it has a set of scripted missions designed to be played in co-op mode with as many friends as you wish to cram into the server. There are approximately 11 co-op missions, each with their own objectives and little nuances. The missions are also quite challenging, and either require an over-abundance of trigger-happy players or a couple of seconds of extra thought in order to succeed in. While these missions made for some awesome LAN-based gameplay over a weekend or two, I found myself wishing for a bit more – not only in terms of more maps to play, but more unique objectives and vehicles. After a few missions, things seem to devolve into “run in and blow up objective X”, with only a few small variations, and I was very annoyed that some of the game’s more advanced vehicles (such as the hovercraft, heavy APCs, attack choppers, and even the vehicle-carrying Chinooks) were absent, never to be seen once in any of the levels. The AI was also somewhat idiotic, but felt a little improved over Black Hawk Down. Overall, co-op play offered a very satisfying experience, and a lot of the maps are carefully set up to allow for players to co-ordinate a multi-pronged assault from the ground and air if there are enough brains available – I just wish the dev team had taken better advantage of the possibilities they had available, and I pray for a map editor.

Getting into an actual online battle, Joint Operations takes on a large-scale form almost previously unseen in other FPS titles, with an overwhelmingly vast layer of terrain that comes close to challenging even the likes of Operation: Flashpoint in scale – though not entirely so in detail and variety. In an average Advance And Secure match, several bases are spread all over the huge map with vehicles assisting in rapid deployment and lots of space for maneuvering, tactics, and just plain getting lost, which can sometimes be a bad thing. However, dead players can spawn at any base their team controls just by pushing the relevant letter (A, B, C, D, etc.), provided the base in question isn’t currently under attack and attempting to be occupied. As more players try to respawn at a given base and enemy forces begin stacking up, a countdown timer may appear on the base’s icon, gradually slowing the rate that reinforcements can be spawned into the besieged sector until the enemies are cleared out or end up victorious. Alternatively, hitting space bar will instantly spawn the player at a smaller firebase with zero delay, but this is usually very far from the front lines and sometimes even totally without any vehicle spawns.

Yes, vehicles. Unlike its predecessor with the Black Hawk Down license, Joint Ops offers a full range of drivable vehicles. For casual island-hopping, inflatable Zodiac rafts are available to seat several people, with larger patrol ships sometimes being featured on maps (with integrated grenade launchers, no less) when you really need to throw on an eye patch and become the proverbial Scourge of the Seven Seas. For players preferring to keep their feet mostly dry, ATVs (All-Terrain-Vehicles) are available that can drive over land and water for rapid, effective deployment, but these are totally unarmed and offer zero protection for driver and passengers alike. Jeeps and high-speed buggies are available when you want a .50cal machinegun handy to really drive a point home (no Hummers, sadly), but for the true end-all-be-all of ground warfare, there’s not much that can beat the Armored Personnel Carrier. Loaded with a large armor-piercing cannon, the APCs for both factions are completely impervious to bullets and grenades, with their only real concern being an infantry-clad rocket launcher, a random airstrike, or another APC. Finally, hotshot pilots have numerous aircraft at their disposal, going up from the tiny unarmed “Little Bird” choppers that can carry six occupants (pilot, co-pilot, and four passengers sitting outside on either flank struggling not to get knocked off by a stiff breeze) to slightly more durable attack choppers (the ones with a crazy dumbfire missile attack being one of my favorites for the perfect strafing run to ruin everyone’s day), and even gigantic flying beasts that can carry dozens upon dozens of infantry and even store a couple of vehicles for later deployment. There are also numerous other vehicles in the game (as well as static turrets that can be mounted), but I sadly noted an absence of high-speed jets or other, similar types of aircraft. There also aren’t any real tanks in the game, but given the terrain features (heavy jungle covers most maps), I suppose this is understandable.

As for vehicular physics, I have a compliment, and a complaint. Good news first; I absolutely adore the way Joint Ops handles passengers on a moving vehicle. While most games just tend to kill or throw off players who are stupid enough to be on top of a vehicle while it’s moving (even when going from a full stop), Joint Ops will actually keep this player in position and on the vehicle, even if it encounters some slightly rough terrain. Of course, the obvious thing to do for most players is to just run up and hit the “Use” key to pop into one of the static positions (which will keep them onboard even if the vehicle has the unfortunate fate of flipping over and exploding horribly several seconds later), but the point I was trying to make is that, thanks to the handling of player collision interaction with vehicles, it’s actually possible to pile an entire platoon of a half-dozen or more infantry into a small buggy or jeep on top of the initial limitation of three to five passengers. I was personally amazed at how stable this seemingly minor thing was, as I was even able to repeatedly get up from the chair I was “mounted” on (shut up) and walk around inside of an airborne chopper to take a look out back without fear of being thrown clear if a lag spike rolled around. My group of local friends even got creative after awhile, and we had a contest to see how many choppers we could park on a patrol boat and still manage to move it around like some kind of crazy mini-carrier. To their credit, BF1942 and BFV also feature this kind of collision handling (helloooooo wing-riding!), but Joint Ops really impressed me in this regard.

And now the bitching. The actual vehicle physics (like the bouncing of tires realistically over terrain and effects of taking a jump across a gorge) are acceptable, but I kept seeing a lot of instances where they could have been a hell of a lot better. On several instances, I’ve bounced off or ran into several consecutive objects while zooming through a small village at a high speed, only to somehow end up airborne and instantly teleport back to the ground, flat on my head. A rolled vehicle offers no chance for recovery, and actually explodes after a couple of seconds, which forced me to quickly bail out and slog my way back to the vehicle respawn zone in a depressed manner. This kind of thing seemed to happen at the most inconvenient of times – the game really doesn’t seem to handle complicated jumps or high-speed shenanigans in rough terrain very well, and attempting to pull this off will commonly result in some very odd behavior. Hilarious, perhaps, especially if witnessed by a third party laughing his ass off in the other room, but definitely odd, and it definitely isn’t anything to do with latency (I tested a lot of this on my own server or a local connection). Vehicles also have a near-useless gearing system, which literally equates to “High”, “Medium”, and “Low”, and the only time I ever found the need to modify this setting was playing co-op, when I felt the occasional need to try and sneak up on an enemy before splattering him on my bumper, or just proceeding carefully through a town filled with pissed off AI terrorists relying excessively on aimbot and wallhack to cut us to ribbons before we ever saw them.

Even running over enemies never seemed to work as well as it should; for every two enemy soldiers I would crush mercilessly with my high-speed wagon of doom, a third would not die, but instead get stuck on the roof of my vehicle and end up killing everyone onboard with impunity while we tried to figure out why the hell I hadn’t heard a distinct scream of death following the loud “thump” of my vehicle running over somebody. Vehicular combat always adds a bunch of excitement to any online game, and I just love being able to actually move my vehicle while a team mate is in contact with it without fear of accidentally team killing him when I nudge it forward an inch (go to hell, Halo), but I’m not entirely certain if I approve of some of the freakish physics-related anomalies I’ve seen as a result of trying to approach this game’s driving system as if I were playing a classical session of Big Red Racing. I’m really getting tired of suddenly ending up sitting on my head with a confused look on my face while my team mates bail out and issue a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot when a jump that should have gone perfectly by all means somehow ended in misery because the game’s physics engine went “Oh, wait, you’re not supposed to be in the air bouncing off that shrub, you should be ON THE GROUND, UPSIDE-DOWN!” Humbug, guess I’ll have to take the Stunt Racing League back to Battlefield 1942 / Vietnam.

Moving on, the interface in Joint Operations really accommodates everything the player needs to know about what’s going on. There’s a zoomable radar / mini-map display at the lower right that shows assorted waypoints, objective information, terrain features, and, interestingly enough, the general direction a bullet or other projectile that landed somewhere near you came from. It seems like a bit of a cheap fix to appeal to whining players, but considering how hard it can be to see who’s got you in their sights given the game’s vast maps and lack of huge, flashy weapons, many tend to think of it as a godsend just to give you some kind of fighting chance against a well-positioned bad guy. Moving on, the bottom part of the screen handles covers chat and system messages, with the lower left showing current health, posture status (standing, crouched, prone), and ammo levels for the current weapon. Interestingly, the rest of the screen is left totally untouched, with the only top left offering a casual net-o-meter to monitor server latency, and the rest being clear of anything intrusive. The crosshairs are nice and tidy – more than adequate for the act of pointing them at something and clicking the left mouse button repeatedly – but when real accuracy is needed, iron sights can be brought up to get a direct view down the barrel of your gun. Aside from that, there isn’t really much else to make a note on. There are first and third person views available (the latter being extremely limited and more for showing yourself off) and a map display that can be brought up in a small window or brought to full-screen for quick and easy navigation assistance, but the only other big display the game offers is a “Commander View”, where players can actually form squads with other players (they can be invited, or join requests to other squads can be sent) and interact easily, with the Commander of the group setting up waypoints and issuing direct orders via the map display. I wish I had more information, but I only saw the panel being used for tactical purposes about as much as it ever was in the original Tribes, so I don’t have much experience to go on. Understandable I guess, given how most players impulsively go lone wolf rather than rally to the cry of “GET IN THE CHOPPER YOU *#@&$ OR I WILL HACK YOUR INTERNET”.