Review: Elite Forces

When it comes to military based games there are two major aspects, action and strategy, the ratio these elements mix varies from game to game. Personally I prefer the games to be action heavy, and when I heard the name Elite Forces I was expecting something along the lines of a Rainbow Six game. What I got though wasn't what I was expecting, but I'll give it a go anyway.

The Usual Suspects

The story to Elite Forces is a familiar one, you play as a crack team of soldiers who must take down a group of terrorists threatening the world. This team is made up of four specialists, the best in the world in their chosen field apparently, first off you get Kendra Chase, the only female member of the team, and sniper of the highest calibre. Then comes Dag Hammer, heavy weapons specialist, who wields a bazooka as if it were a machine gun.

Demolitions expert T.K Richter is next, not only can he place explosives, throw grenades, and detect and disarm land mines, but he can also drive. Finishing off the team is Bill Matic, IT expert, any computer or electronic systems need bypassing, he's your man. Your team will track this terrorist threat through several inhospitable environments, jungle, dessert and finally the Arctic, before tracking them down and eliminating the threat completely. Like I said, a familiar story, but the gameplay and presentation is a little different from the usual games revolving around such stories.

Commanding your Squad

Rather than an action based game viewed from the soldiers viewpoint this is more of a real time strategy game with a top down viewpoint and completely touch screen controls. Normally this type of game isn't really my cup of tea, but I found it very easy to get in to thanks to the ease of the control system. The controls couldn't be easier to get the hang of really, to move your squad just drag the stylus in the direction you want to go, to shoot at enemies, just give them a prod with the stylus.

Your squad can be split up, and reunited, using the group icon, you don't want the whole squad charging up behind you when you are disarming a minefield, do you? And the individual characters special abilities are easily used, either from activation with an icon, or interacting with objects by touching them with your stylus. It's a tried and tested system that has translated well to the DS's touch screen. Despite the RTS style control scheme the action is quite fast paced, and the battles not on the usual scale of most RTS games, which also goes a long way to making Elite Forces a more accessible game to the RTS novice.

Passes Inspection

Presentation wise the game is a bit of a mixed bag, you get some nice cut scenes to further the story, and the games menus are all very clear and well laid out, but the in game presentation does leave a bit to be desired. Your team members can be a little hard to differentiate between sometimes, some of the games environments don't help with this either, the jungle environment I found it especially difficult, not just to work out who was who, but to see what was going on at all sometimes.

Soldiers wearing camouflage is, of course, a good idea in the real world, but in video games can be a little confusing, it doesn't help that the scenery can obscure the view more in the jungle areas too. Thankfully the dessert and Arctic environments don't have trees to obscure your view, and the brown and grey camouflage in these areas isn't half as effective as the green in the jungle, so things aren't so confusing once you reach the dessert stage. All this is going on on the DS's touch screen, with the top screen mainly used as a map and radar, nothing fancy but it does the job, but on occasion the map is replaced by a little cutscene when you encounter one of the games bosses.

Not without Problems

The game does have other flaws apart from the occasional obscured view though, one I found particularly annoying was the sniper rifle. As a weapon in your hands it is great, you can pop enemies from a distance, and strangely you can even shoot through objects such as building, the only problem is, it has the same ability in the hands of your enemies. Normally you are alerted to snipers by their laser sights, but if there's a building in the way you don't see them, but the sniper can still shoot you, very annoying.

Other niggles are, apart from sniping, you can only shoot enemies that are on the screen, despite them showing up early on radar, the vehicles can be a little fiddly to drive, but the most frustrating of all is the infrequency of save points. You'd think that a save point mid way and at the end of every level would be sufficient, but I found myself having to replay the same sections over and over again to the point of throwing my DS out the window. Maybe if they'd positioned the save points better, namely at the points just before the bits that would kill you far too often, the game wouldn't appear so unforgiving. Another thing that made the game unforgiving was that if you lose a team member, doesn't matter who, then it's game over, fair enough if they were needed to complete the mission, but sometimes not every members special skills are required. It was just another thing that made me have to just put the game down from time to time before I got frustrated enough to do something I would regret.

Could have been better

Elite Forces is a bit of a strange game really, somewhere between a RTS game and an arcade shooter, it's certainly more accessible than most RTS games, so maybe could be an introduction to the genre for beginners. The games flaws do let it down though, and coupled with the fact that there are only twelve missions, and no multiplayer game it may not hold your attention for too long. It's a real shame about the lack of multiplayer, as I think a four player co-op game would have outweighed some of the games problems.