In an industry that is full of military themed real-time strategy games, it's comforting to know that there's still room for games that have horrible voice acting. How better to make cut scenes and mission briefings seem twice as long as they actually are? Joint Task Force is a game that features both real-time and tactical gameplay along with the aforementioned bad voices. Normally, it wouldn't be quite so bad if only the bland, flat voices weren't used for the unit responses too. People sometimes complain about the amount of clicking a real-time strategy game generally requires, and it seems that JTF's solution is to make you not want to click them at all, or cringe at about half the units' replies.

The Joint Task Force, the fantastically plain name for which the game is named after, is a multinational strike force sent into hot zones to take care of military and terrorist factions without having to answer to a lot of bureaucracy. Set in the near future, the War on Terror left the state of the world extremely destabilized, with third world nations left at the margins like never before. Warlords are taking advantage and rising to power, and someone needs to stop them. That's where the JTF steps in. These elite soldiers will be assigned to places like Somalia, Columbia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The player is allotted a set number of units along with a hero, all of which have a chance to rise up in rank. When the hero gains a new level, he can pick up new powers to increase his own abilities or help his army. The hero also has an opportunity to call in reinforcements, purchase upgrades in the field (in certain areas), and access vehicles like tanks and aircraft. Units carry over from mission to mission, making it worthwhile to keep some of them alive. Everything happens in real-time, but the player can pause at any time and issue commands accordingly.

One of the main things that sets JTF apart from other real-time strategy games with tactical elements is the fact that there are no resources to mine. Instead, the player will be trying to win public favor. For a so-called covert-ops unit, the media sure keeps a pretty good eye on your movements. Every once in a while, a somewhat distracting little news screen will pop up, narrating your mission progress. If you accomplish your missions (bonus for secondary goals) without too many civilian casualties or losses, then you reputation will grow stronger in the public's eye. Strong public support means more funding that you can use to equip your soldiers.

Despite being a real-time strategy game, JTF is really slow paced. Players will spend most of their time sneaking across different levels waiting for foes to drop in on them. This goes on until you can get a marksman, at which time the only thing you'll need to worry about is mobile armor. Once your hero is able to see far distances and grants nearby units with some stealth, the game becomes an exercise in patience. But I suppose that could easily be said at just about any point of the game.

The game plays out realistically when it comes to infantry vs. armor. There are some things (like tanks) that are bulletproof, and no amount of rifle fire can penetrate it. Controlling your units, however, can become a real pain. All units are given their own independent artificial intelligence. That means, if they come under fire, they will immediately run for nearby cover. Unfortunately, that doesn't necessarily mean they'll fire back at their assailants while crawling for cover. Sometimes, nearby cover isn't necessarily "nearby," so your soldiers end up trying to crawl for half a block while they get mowed down by enemy gunfire. For an elite group of soldiers, they need a lot of babysitting. Independent AI also means that these troops have a tendency to become insubordinate. You can tell your medic to take cover somewhere, and he'll immediately defy your order to go heal a moderately wounded soldier. If you order an attack, a unit might go running towards an enemy vehicle, where it quickly meets an untimely demise under a set of treads or a spray of bullets.

Not everything in JTF is bad. Like the fact that you can commandeer just about any vehicle that isn't burnt out and use it to your own ends. If you manage to kill the driver and gunner off a gun-mounted pickup truck without blowing the vehicle up, you can use it to further your own goals. So, it doesn't always pay to reach for the rocket launcher whenever a car drives up. The same can be said for anti-air guns, which can be conveniently pointed at approaching vehicles. You can hijack a truck and ram through fences to carve your own path or blow up gas tankers... just because. Be careful because that kind of collateral damage could reflect badly on you.

JTF has the potential to be a pretty decent game. The different locales are well-detailed and look very good. This is also one of the few RTS games that tries to deal, in a way, with the War on Terror as the central theme instead of being another historical WWII title. It's also interesting to have media approval be the main resource, since it's an interesting commentary on the relationship between journalism and war. But a lot if its good intentions work out badly. With a slow, uneven pace, unruly units, and an uninteresting story topped off by bad voice acting, JTF should be disbanded.