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Combat Task Force 121 
Release date: 24 Mar 2005
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Mygamer review
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Combat Task Force 121
Cruising the shelves at the local game store for first-person shooters, one may think that the only settings for this kind of game are World War II, international counter-terrorism, and Hell. It’d be nice if someone would offer something new and/or stylish. Combat – Task Force 121 implies so much, yet means and offers so little.
Let’s get one thing straight—if you’re a Counterstrike junkie (particularly sporting Source), stop reading now. You’ve got the best counter-terrorism package available. Combat is chock full of problems and tries to do the right things in the wrong places.
For starters, the name alone implies something more than a solo affair. Since when is one man a task force? Yet that’s what the single player component of the game offers. You begin your extremely linear, fairly boring quest to again rid the world of terror by jumping onto an oil platform in the middle of the ocean. Great. The mission briefing said I’d have the element of surprise until shots were fired. Looking around to take in the scenery before sneaking up on my first victim, two things become disturbingly apparent. One, somebody forgot to render the ocean. It’s hard to say if it was a hardware or software glitch, but either way, the endless deep blue showed up as a big smattering of white nothingness. Two, I was already taking fire. So much for the stealthy approach.
The enemies you’ll encounter in Combat don’t take many hits to kill, which is fortunate because they have a sense of detection beyond primal. Crouched in foliage in the dark of night, zooming in with the sniper rifle, enemies a half-mile away suddenly turn and open fire on my exact position. It’s kind of ridiculous. At the same time, you can fire your weapon at a guy with his back to you, or shoot his buddy right in front of him, and he doesn’t alter his patrol path one iota.
Then there are the weapons themselves. You don’t so much pick up new weapons as you are assigned a class, something that is manually selectable but largely moot in multiplayer play. So if you get a sniper rifle for a mission and nothing else but a pistol, knife, and grenade, given their relative ESP, bad guys won’t let you drop them with the long-barrel. Have fun in the close-quarters fracas that ensues!
The gun models look good, reloading animations and all, but they point out how blah much of the rest of the game world looks. Sprite foliage, horrid vehicle models, and inconsistent lighting effects further the sense of inconsistency. The fire effects don’t look too bad, at least.
Firing a weapon is like calling your girlfriend the wrong name—pull the trigger and try your darndest to keep the reticule near the target. The knife implies that a stealthy approach might actually work and be satisfying. As mentioned above, sneaking up on anyone is next to impossible, and at that range you might as well pop a pistol round into your enemy. Your victim’s comrades take notice of neither the sight of a corpse nor the sounds of a gunshot as much as they simply sense your presence.
Grenades are pretty useless since they’re hard to judge distance with, and have limited splash damage effects. Even the RPG launcher under the M16 doesn’t do much good unless you plaster someone right in the chest with it.
The dearth of extra gadgets pulls the game further behind where it ought to be. A flashlight or night vision seems standard nowadays, or at least being able to shoot out light bulbs. Not here. Not in Groove’s game.
Interacting with the environment—whether it’s to flip a light switch, pick up ammo off a dead body, open a door, or pick up a key—requires a progress bar. This is idiotic, a case of trying to add realism where it truly isn’t needed. Nothing is as fun in a heated firefight as having to stop and feel up a dead guy to get a few more bullets! By then you’d be able to just cough some up out of a punctured lung.
What’s more, finding keys and keycards takes up at least half the game, and they’re not highlighted in any special way to stand out from the rest of the environment. If there’s one thing that’ll drag down an action game in a hurry, it’s breaking the pace and forcing monotonous backtracking and item hunting. Shame on you, Groove Games, for making me key-hunt. It’s not like you made Halo and accidentally made the last third of the game all look the same. You made crap and intentionally added flies.
The segue between the first two missions offers up more generic mission briefings to the tune of completely wooden voice acting and some pretty ugly concurrent video of your upcoming mission, most of which is indecipherable since you have no idea what the mission will look like. It’s not much of a handicap, though, since the shortest distance between two points is any given mission in Combat. For the humor and/or trigonometrically impaired, that means the missions are dreadfully straightforward and offer no improvisation or excitement.
After the thankfully skippable briefing and terse load time, the next mission loads. But there’s a surprise waiting for you! No sound! If you keep playing, you might even get to see the blue screen of death. That’s what happened to me, so I went patch-hunting (you can get the patch here). Applying it fixed the sound and crashing problems, but some graphical bugs persisted.
So with such a sub-par single player experience, is there anything to redeem this title? Sort of. Multiplayer is fairly robust, featuring standard deathmatch, flag cap, team DM, protect the VIP, and the other usual suspects, and players can pick among classes such as sniper, soldier, demolitions, heavy weapons, and close-quarters. Most levels and missions won’t require these specialists, so one’s about as good as any other, especially when you discover that the pistol has a slight zoom and is about as effective as any other gun—and much easier to control when aiming. There’s even a Training mode with bots, but only for deathmatch. Evidently developing good bots for other gameplay modes wasn’t a priority. This is a pity since the few players who get their hands on this and take the fight to the Internet will tire of killing each other after a short time.
The budget price may lure you towards Combat, but devote your money to better games. Encouraging this sub-par budget mentality in the gaming world is only going to breed more. I mentioned Counterstrike as being superior in this genre, but even the now-ancient Team Fortress outdoes Combat at it’s very own game. Heck, Combat on the Atari 2600 had more excitement and replay value.
Review by Mark Buckingham on 17 May 2005
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