Field Ops - Hands On Preview
Jon Wilcox
30/01/2007
TVG heads off to Cuba in a bid to stop rebels from threatening the United States...
Announced in Spring 2006, Field Ops is the debut title from Swiss-based publisher, Freeze Interactive, and is in development at Hungarian-based Digital Reality. Following the exploits of a team of US Special Ops as they try to stop a coup d'etat in Cuba from threatening the United States, Field Ops is being developed as a so-called "Real Time Strategy Shooter", offering a mix of RTS and FPS gameplay to create "the perfect mix between strategy and fast-paced military action"...or so says Freeze. Armed with a single mission taster of the Single-Player Campaign, TVG headed over to the Caribbean island to spearhead the counter-attack...
Set in Cuba's second city, Santiago de Cuba, the preview build follows the Special Ops team as they attempt to capture coup leader, Ramiro Omar Rodriguez. One of five locations played through the course of the game, Field Ops' Santiago de Cuba is strewn with everything you'd expect from one of the country's cities; cars that hark back to the 1950s dot the largely empty streets, whilst the occasional appearance of Spanish colonial-style stone buildings all establish the fact that it's Cuba. The occasional cry in Spanish as enemies are mown down with semi-automatic gunfire also helps...
Freeze touts Field Ops as the first Real Time Strategy Shooter hybrid, with players capable of switching between the two viewpoints in real-time. A mere button press brings players down to street level, through the eyes of any of the soldiers in the Special Ops team. Moving the initial four-man squad through the rat-run streets of Santiago, with a select number of side-streets through an otherwise linear map, it's clear that Freeze's idea of bringing the two genres together aims to create an experience that's greater than the sum of its parts. Both RTS and FPS titles are more than commonplace today, and using both perspectives gives the game a unique feature to help it stand out from the crowd. So how is it shaping up in practice?
For such a hybrid title to work, it's absolutely essential that a balance between the two viewpoints is struck. After all, there's no point in having the option of switching between RTS and FPS views if the experience works better in one, and not the other; the 'Real Time Strategy Shooter' experience would be nothing more than a gimmick. Working our way through the streets of Santiago de Cuba, the relationship between the two perspectives didn't seem particularly forced, which is certainly a good thing. Besides the standard RTS control system for moving units, access to squad commands in the view is made through a right-button mouse click, enabling players to order soldiers to do everything from throwing grenades, to protecting a specific area of the gameworld. Despite the ability to order units to protect each other, adding much needed support against enemies in both FPS and RTS perspectives, the dedicated FPS squad command system was disabled in the preview build. Its absence was just another example of how Field Ops isn't quite as polished as it should be at this stage of development.
Of the eight unit classes said to appear in the final game, only three were available in preview mission (Heavy Gunner, Medic, and Assault), the same number demonstrated to TVG twelve months ago...do the other five exist? Very few details are available on the classes aside from their titles (CIA Agent, Demonlitions, Anti-Tank, Sniper, and Engineer), so who knows whether Freeze has amalgamated one or more of them into a single unit class? As well as the Special Ops team, players will be able to take direct control of vehicles (provided they are manned). But besides an enemy Armoured Personnel Carrier, the Santiago mission didn't feature any military vehicles for the team to use, so we were left driving around one of the previously mentioned 1950s style cars instead. In the final release version of the game, players will be able to take control of vehicles in air, land, and water-based situations, but so far Freeze has only revealed one of the vehicles, the AH1W Cobra helicopter.
Very much a Work in Progress (at least, we're hoping it is), Digital Reality will have to continue tightening up the experience offered by Field Ops between now and release, most notably with regards to the AI of both friendly and enemy forces. It's a balance that fundamentally has to perform well in order for the idea of a Real Time Strategy Shooter to work, otherwise Field Ops will end up being lost in a 'Jack of All Trades' situation. For instance, having a lone enemy perform kamikaze runs towards a player's team who have their guns blazing, isn't something that we hope to see in the final version. The same goes for some members of the Special Ops team too, who seemed to insist on running within yards of an enemy position before finally throwing a grenade at them; it's almost as if they want to be caught in the blast too. That said, the team's formations and situational awareness in the RTS view overall seems to be coming along rather well, with each member taking up tactical positions behind cover, and identifying targets at distance.
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