Written by Jeff Buckland, 9/15/2004
Played on:
Windows
This is pure opinion here on my part, but I think Joint Operations: Typhoon Rising is the first game from Novalogic that's really got it together. They've delivered quite a few Delta Force titles over the years, and have managed to capture enough FPS gamers each time to fund the next game, but they've never really scored it big. I doubt that Joint Ops is going to change that trend for Novalogic, but at least this time there's a great game under the hood.
Novalogic is quick to boast about their 150 player servers, and from a first person shooter perspective, they're only beaten in this respect by Planetside's battles which can easily involve more than double that in certain areas at times. So Novalogic has had to refine their statement by saying it's the only non-subscription FPS to have battles this large, and that's pretty much on the money. Let's dig into just how a game can support this many players and still make it fun for one person - specifically, you.
Joint Ops uses some of Novalogic's best technology yet, with an outdoor engine that rivals Far Cry in terms of eye candy. While the graphics aren't here quite as smooth or stylish as Crytek's recent FPS hit, Novalogic has easily made up for that with huge-scale battles that can go on across multiple islands at once. Multiplayer is the focus, here, so many things have been tuned in that respect.
Joint Ops does include a few things rarely seen in an online action game. There's a slow day-night cycle that's particularly effective for changing how a map plays out; because it's that much more difficult to see enemies at night, your tactics will have to change according to the time of day. The effect looks excellent as well, and will completely change the atmosphere of a map as well as help add a bit of variety at the same time.
All this action across huge landscapes winds up taking its toll, though, and that toll is in the frame rate. 150-player games will tax your system more than Far Cry (or even DOOM 3 on high detail), but the frame rate winds up generally being pretty consistent. So far, I've found that about 30fps is the sweet spot for detail versus playability in this game, and I was able to get this with just about every bit of detail cranked up at 1280x1024 resolution (including 4x FSAA and 8x Anisotropic filtering) on my Athlon 64 with a Radeon X800 Pro video card.
If you look at the minimum requirements listed at the top of this article, you might be wondering just how this game is supposed to play on the minimum system. Surprisingly, the game ran fine on my second computer, a decidedly low-end Athlon 1GHz computer with a GF4 Ti4200 video card and only 384MB of memory. At minimum detail and 800x600 resolution I could squeak by with 20fps on the servers with a low player limit (which means around 50 in Joint Ops), although the 150-player servers caused the game to really chop whenever more than a few players were on screen at once.
Joint Ops has been out for a few months now, and Novalogic has spent this time busily working on improving the player's experience. Three patches have been released so far, and while I had no experience with the first patch, the second and third patches have tightened up quite a few holes and added plenty of little bits and pieces to improve the game overall. There are still some areas I'd like to see fixed, like the ability to see more comprehensive player stats in-game.
For those few bugs that are still left, Novalogic seems to have come to a bit of an impasse in fixing them. "High" frame effects still cannot be combined with FSAA on high-end ATI Radeon cards, which are the only ATI cards that can do this stuff at an acceptable frame rate anyway. Still, the game looks excellent, so I can't really complain that much here. The other issue is with cheats, and while Punkbuster is integrated into Joint Ops, the cheaters still relentlessly make headway here and there. At the very least, Even Balance does an excellent job stopping mass amounts of cheating, so it winds up being no worse than any other high-profile online shooter.
All this functionality and all these vehicles and weapons pretty much demand a complicated control scheme, but Novalogic has done their best to keep it as simple as they can. Joysticks are not necessary for flying the helicopters, and the flight model is much more similar to Battlefield Vietnam's simplified style than Desert Combat's.
Unlike Desert Combat, though, infantry is essential in almost all areas of the game, and the FPS controls here are very well done. I was able to bind all the keys I wanted (save for one: the "auto-run" command, which is stuck on the highly inaccessible Scroll Lock key), and the mouse controls were smooth and intuitive. Driving vehicles and piloting boats worked pretty much as I expected, although the game's collision system for hitting trees and other object is incredibly lenient. You can pretty much bumble your way through a whole forest in a jeep, hitting every tree on your way, and still come out unscathed. It's highly unrealistic, but it does at least add to the element of fun and allows you to use the ground vehicles in highly wooded areas to some extent.
Novalogic has really put some effort into Joint Ops' visuals, and while the style is pretty narrow here - it focuses exclusively on east Asian tropical islands - they have managed to make each map unique. Some will have you marching through a town to take the center square, while others have you hopping islands in choppers or over rickety bridges to achieve goals.
The vehicles look excellent, and the animations are near-perfect with the exception of the occasional netcode issue making vehicles jump around or stick to stuff strangely. The textures, while not as bright as Far Cry's, are a bit more realistic and are still impressive enough for me to consider this to be one of the best-looking games out right now.
The game has only two sides you can join, no matter the map - Rebels and Joint Ops forces - but there are many skins and models to choose from for each side (including females for both sites, something rare in a military-oriented FPS). The weapon graphics impressed me for the most part, and using the iron sights mode will blur the gun model. It shows that you're focusing your vision downrange, not on the gun itself.
Joint Ops' special effects are impressive without really going over the top on visuals. Most explosions look great, although some of them aren't quite as satisfying as I'd have liked. I do like the fact that any blown-up vehicle leaves a carcass, which in the case of helicopters can come crashing down in pieces (although these pieces don't seem to harm the hapless people they land on).
