Reviewed: July 2, 2004
Reviewed by: Daniel Sayre

Publisher
Novalogic

Developer
Novalogic

Released: June 15, 2004
Genre: Online FPS
Players: 64 / 150
ESRB: Teen

8
7
7
7
7.3

System Requirements

Joint Ops features:

• EXPLOSIVE 150+ PLAYER GAMES – Play in games with 150 players online via NovaWorld, or host your own games with up to 64 players online or over a LAN.
• BADDER-WAR MACHINES, like the LCAC hovercraft loaded with mechanized troops, lead a team of Black Hawks & AH-6 Little Birds and RAIN HELL FIRE from above as you lay waste to enemy bases. ROLL over the enemy and PULVERIZE their defenses with the remote control cannon on your Stryker attack vehicles.
• DEFEND your teammates & OBLITERATE the enemy with 35 MODERN-DAY WEAPONS! Deliver a deadly long range message with a shoulder fired stinger missile, or kick ass at close range with the M4 rifle with the optional M203 grenade launcher.
• HUGE unprecedented JUNGLE ENVIRONMENTS! Wage war across maps up 64 square KM, with viewing distances up to 1 Km.
• 12 TRAINING MISSIONS –Learn how to handle weapons, drive vehicles and jungle warfare tactics essential for victory and survival
• 5 CLASSES to choose from – Fight as a Rifleman, Engineer, Gunner, Medic or Sniper from one of 7 different countries-- US, UK, France, Germany, Russia, Australia and Indonesia!

The “storyline” involves the UN trying to prevent the breakup of Indonesia but, as with most FPS games, it is entirely clichéd and can be completely disregarded without missing a beat.

Gone is any type of “instant action” type section or bots of any sort. The closest you get is hosting a co-op LAN game that sets you as a lone operative against practically an army. In a “realistic” (one shot, one kill) game setting, these are practically insurmountable odds and successfully completing them is neigh impossible.

Playing on “Novaworld” is hardly ideal either, as lag is ever-present. When one of the main selling points of the game is 150-men battles, they need to be stable. Although the graphics chug so much (more on this later) I’m hesitant to blame it fully on the net coding.

Choosing a player is done with a flexible system of “class” selection. The classes are Medic, Sniper, Gunner, Rifleman, and Engineer. Each of the classes offers “unique” weapons and you are allowed to customize them to a certain degree. Changing guns, grenade types, etc.

The more stuff you carry in the four categories, rifle, handgun, rocket/mine, and grenades will affect your movement speed. The less you have, the faster you move and vice versa. Still, the movement differences are far from earth shattering.

The selection of vehicles is pretty varied. Several air and ground vehicles can be controlled. Everything from little recon buggies, to S.E.A.L. rafts, all the way to Comanche helicopters are at your disposal. Many of the vehicles also offer ample opportunity for others to tag along.

Going partially away from the “Battlefield standard” of one man per selectable spot, you now have the ability to freely roam around the interior of the vehicles. In achieving this, the “selectable spots” are still present, but by allowing this freedom you can cram as many people as you see fit into/onto the vehicles.

Conspicuous in their absence are any aspects of aerial warfare beyond helicopters. There are no attack jets, planes, blimps, or aerial reconnaissance craft. Far from the only puzzling omission, tanks are also M.I.A. Joint Ops seems to be focused squarely on the human element of warfare, offering only a single vehicle that allows you to attack with it. The others are used mostly as support and are either immobile or unable to attack when a single person is using them.

However, nearly all of the vehicles feature areas to place soldiers either behind stationary weapons (machine guns, chain guns, grenade launchers, etc) or having areas while they can sit and use their own weapons. You can also switch from spot to spot if you’re driving solo and you spot trouble.

When you go on-line, you have four game modes from which to choose. Team Deathmatch, Team King of the Hill, Cooperative and Advance and Secure Of these, Cooperation offers the most fun. Each mission (of which there are several) is pretty diverse.

For every “assault the enemy base” there are missions like retrieving a downed pilot. A lot of the maps are also available in the other modes. Each map also has a little “story” about it. This helps the immersion greatly, so it’s not just fighting over “generic battleground #583.”

The controls are also fairly intuitive but not entirely perfect. There are some questionable design decisions that keep Joint Ops from being as user-friendly as it could have been. A good example is that instead of simply pressing a key to switch positions, you have to hold in the CTRL key then press the corresponding number; certainly more complicated than necessary.

You can also edit/alter most of the controls to your liking. Helicopter control is also very simplistic, MUCH easier then BF:Vietnam’s, but you do lose some control and abilities in the trade.

In the end you just have a lot of hoops to jump through to achieve any sort of enjoyable gameplay from Joint Ops. You have to have some serious hardware, you have to get into the often buggy NovaWorld server, you have to hook-up with a "good" group of gamers and not a bunch of punks trying to spoil everyone elses' experience. When all of these things click Join Ops offers a thrilling multiplayer experience with the potential for countless hours of enjoyment.

There are also plenty of player models and skins, each culled from certain countries Special Forces, Rangers, Navy Seals, SAS, KSK, etc. This keeps the battlefields pretty diverse. The rebel forces, on the other hand, have about five models. It makes sense in the storyline, so it can be forgiven.

Death animations are also present. Ideally, this being 2004 and all, all games should employ some sort of real-time physics system for player deaths. Seeing a guy crumple one of five ways is pretty boring when you’re killing people left and right. A lot of games are guilty of this, and I’m pretty tired of seeing it when the technology has been around for almost a decade.

The clipping in this game is terrible. I’ve been able to walk through trees both on foot and in vehicles numerous times. I have also been stopped by them on occasion, so I know it can happen, but it’s incredibly unpredictable and sloppy.

Joint Ops is a pretty nice looking game if your system meets the “recommended” system requirements and you have a broadband Internet connection. Unfortunately, the game runs poorly on anything less. I did most of my testing on a 2.0GHz Pentium 4 with 512MB of RAM and a Radeon 9700 Pro. While no longer near top the line, it plays almost anything I throw at it.

I was getting very jerky movement, even running with everything set to “LOW” at 800X600 with load times of nearly two minutes. Playing it on a slightly better PC (2.4GHz P4, 1GB, Radeon 9200) I experienced a much better play experience at 1024X768 and everything set to normal while load times were well under 30 seconds. The lag is consistent through multiplayer games of any size (small, medium or large) so this means the lag is in the code or engine and not the scale of the games or the Novalogic servers. It can be fixed.

The soundtrack is typical for a Novalogic game. No orchestral score or anything, just little music things on the menu’s and pretty much stock ambient noise on all the stages. Not terribly important in a game like this, but couldn’t have hurt to include it.

At $40, Joint Ops is slightly less then what you’d expect to pay for a new top of the line game. Are their better ways to spend $40 on games? Certainly. You can even spend less then $40 and get a better game(s) in the same genre. Considering you can find Battlefield 1942: Deluxe Edition for around $30, Joint Ops just doesn’t cut it.

If you want the best game that involves soliders and vehicles, pick up Battlefield 1942 or Vietnam. If you already have those then Joint Ops won’t be a bad pickup when it reaches a $20 price point. As it is now, the price is too much to justify what you end up with, at least until the game is "fixed". There is a potential for greatness here had they wanted another month or so before releasing it. Now we all get to wait for the obligatory patches to iron out the wrinkles in this ambitious online game.