Joint Operations: Typhoon Rising

The demo for the PC title Joint Operations: Typhoon Rising is now available, and I almost want to recommend downloading it so you can see why you might not want to buy when it arrives in May.

The game looks okay once you start it up, though the textures are extremely bland. The draw distance is pretty far, though the environment is extremely plastic looking. In game models, especially vehicles, look poor, especially compared to a free user community mod like Desert Combat. The Humvees look more like armored Honda Civics, for example.

There’s almost no physics in this game. All four wheels of the Humvees stay firmly planted on the ground no matter how bumpy the road, and there’s no collision damage to speak of. In fact, I’ve not only rammed helicopters straight into mountains without a scratch, I managed to load a Humvee into the back of a Chinook transport helicopter, fly over to the enemy base at the maximum altitude of 500 feet, leave the pilot seat, jump into the Humvee, drive it out the back and fall four hundred feet, bounce once and drive away without a single scratch or dent on either me or the vehicle.

Overall, I can’t see any real reason, other than the claims of lag free 100 player servers, to buy this game over, say, a three year old copy of Operation Flashpoint, let alone something like Battlefield 1942 with the Desert Combat mod installed.