By
Tom Chick |
Nov 30, 2004
This follow-up to Joint Operations is an expansion pack that would make Evel Knievel proud.
There's been an avalanche of high-profile first-person shooters this year, many of them great. It's been an absolute embarrassment of riches, and that includes NovaLogic's
Joint Operations. Now that the
Escalation add-on pack has arrived, it's time to dig it out and give
Half-Life 2, Doom 3, Unreal Tournament 2004, Battlefield: Vietnam, Far Cry, and
Painkiller a break.
In a way,
Joint Operations is an unlikely candidate for an expansion pack. It's a complete package, shrewdly designed to play a certain way. It stood out from the competition for a number of things: the emphasis on infantry combat, the way vehicles encouraged teamwork instead of lone wolfing, the size of the maps, the tactical options afforded by the weapons, and the all-too-easy-to-use helicopters. The sheer scope of the battles was unrivaled (with perhaps the exception of the 12ドル.99-per-month
PlanetSide). So in a finely tuned situation like
Joint Operations, the first requirement for an expansion pack is the same as Hippocrates dictum for physicians: first of all, do no harm.
I Call Shotgun!
What's most surprising about
Escalation is that the things you'd expect to break the game, in fact, don't break the game at all. Namely, the new heavy tanks and assault helicopters. You'd expect this sort of hardware would rule a battlefield and shatter
Joint Operations' emphasis on infantrymen's boots on the ground. But there are a couple of ways
Escalation nicely balances the heavy firepower.
Rub-a-dub-dub, two men in an Apache
Firstly, effective use of a tank or assault helicopter requires that most precious commodity in an online shooter: teamwork. In the helicopters, one player flies while the other shoots and pops off flares for defense. What's more, the helicopter's powerful rockets are aligned with the fuselage, so the pilot has to aim them while the gunner actually shoots them. Similarly, tanks need a separate driver and gunner (although it's fairly common to see players trying to solo in a tank by jumping between the two positions). There's also a little-used third position in the tank for a commander, but since he's perched atop the cupola without any protection, he might as well have a neon 'Shoot Me!' sign floating over his head. Since the other team is usually happy to oblige, you don't generally see a three-man tank crew.
The crew's positions are also distinguished by their situational awareness. The gunner can only see through the narrow confines of his gun sight, while the pilot or driver has the opportunity for a wider third-person view. This is another new addition to
Joint Operations that makes the already simplified vehicles even easier to drive. This will be a relief not only to less experienced helicopter pilots, but to their passengers as well. You'll see a lot fewer helicopters plowing into trees.
The Javelin Throw
These vehicles are also balanced by their vulnerability to infantry weapons. Helicopters have always been inviting targets for a soldier with a Stinger shoulder-launched missile. Now Javelin guided anti-tank missiles have been added to keep armored vehicles on their toes.
Joint Operations offers nothing quite so gratifying as setting up the right distance and line of sight to get a Javelin lock on a rampaging tank. The missile fires off, then arcs up, and slams onto the tank from above. It's a one-shot kill on something that's otherwise really hard to kill. As players get used to the new interplay among tanks and infantry, they play a fairly prominent role on most of
Escalation's new maps. Unfortunately, none of the co-op missions allow player to use the new tanks or helicopters.