There’s quite a lot of chatter these days in the DS and Wii gaming communities about the widespread unwillingness to give third-party titles a fair shot. Especially with the quality of some first-party releases arguably dwindling, it’s always a treat to find a third-party title that rises above the cacophony of cookie-cutter cash-ins and presents something both compelling and refreshingly unique. In other words, an unexpected game that was produced with obvious inspiration and synergy at the heart of its development.
Well, sadly, Elite Forces: Unit 77 simply isn’t that game. While isolated pieces of the experience are well-done, the package as a whole is, quite frankly, a mess of repetitive enemy respawns exacerbated by ho-hum touch-based gameplay. It’s a game that you really want to like, but it simply suffocates you with tedium. In short, it’s a chore to play.
Every American’s war
Elite Forces is based on some pretty familiar modern subject matter. It’s a classic kill-the-terrorists storyline. You work for the United States Elite Forces division, whose goal is to quell the so-called Dawn of the Resurrection terrorist movement, a dangerous group who curiously shares many of the qualities of modern-day al Qaeda. As you work your way through a series of twelve missions, which span a series of jungle, desert, and various other hostile-camp environments, you’ll be met with an assortment of objectives, most of which amount to little more than simple A-to-B errands (detonate this bomb, pick up this weapon, silence this hostile, purge the enemy presence, etc.).
The opening cinema does its best to tell the story, though admittedly, the part with the newscasters looks pretty ridiculous; it will make you laugh and then feel bad about the fact that you laughed at it, you horrible excuse for a human being. Fortunately, the rest of the opening is much better, done in a sort of comic book style and presented in the form of pretty good quality FMV.
The overhead 3-D isometric presentation of the actual gameplay isn’t quite as ambitious, though admittedly some of the foreground trees and other geometric surroundings are a nice touch. Control rests with the stylus; you tap to move (far too slowly, by the way) and tap to interact (shoot, throw grenades, etc.). A strip of icons on the right-hand side of the screen provides control over your squad members (you can tap an individual’s icon to switch to their position) and weapons. You can also pull members into a group by tapping another icon when they’re in close proximity.
Revision: Every American’s war with the control scheme
Beyond that, Elite Forces institutes a positively repulsive “tap to shoot” mechanic which sounds like it might work, but in fact, thanks mostly to circumstances related to (a lack of) camera control and the fact that you also tap to move, it’s often more of a disaster. Every time you attack any enemy, you must tap them… and there are endless throngs of nameless, faceless, identical terrorists that you’ll be dealing with as you make your way through the missions. That means you’ll be doing a hell of a lot of tapping, and unfortunately, none of it is entertaining. This isn’t Diablo II; we’ve got a perfectly capable set of shoulder buttons here which would just love to assume the role of the trigger, and that way I wouldn’t find myself walking into the enemy every time I try to shoot at him from afar. Better yet, I might actually be able to engage enemies who happen to walk behind a tall building or hill (during which time they continue to attack me, draining my health until I can lure them out to visibility to tap on them—I’ve never seen a more compelling case for the silhouette approach). Tapping a target would probably work just fine if it were simply an optional target selection mechanic; but as is, it really just feels like a hurdle.
Besides, as simple as all of this is (even in terms of basic movement), I still found myself wanting to use the D-pad constantly. Maybe it’s just me, but the whole idea of walking with the stylus everywhere I travel never clicked with me (even in the case of the much more refined Zelda: Phantom Hourglass)—and it’s especially unnerving when there’s no obvious reasoning behind the omission of button-based controls. It smacks very much of the motion control mis/overuse on the Wii—but I digress on that point.
You might have noticed earlier that I referred to the existence of so-called “endless throngs” of enemies. Well, I’m not exaggerating—they are quite literally endless. As you traverse the various landscapes, you’ll constantly be approached by groups of three and four equally run-of-the-mill terrorists (some are green and shoot at you and others are brown or black and toss grenades!), all of whom approach and attack in just the same manner. You can spot these terrorists on your top-screen radar from a short distance away, where they’re indicated as red dots… but before the point where those appear, there isn’t really much of anything you can do to prepare. One of the characters’ special abilities is that of a sniper, and she’s able to take down certain threats from long range… but the sniping interface of dragging the aiming cursor to the target is wonky and contrived, and you’re limited to whatever single digit amount of ammunition you currently happen to be carrying (so more than anything, it’s a tool for taking out other snipers—and that’s about it). The fact that you generally can’t see the enemy until they’re around ten feet from you is terribly irritating; there are no camera controls or options which help to alleviate this situation. That means that for ninety-plus percent—wait, make that ninety-five-plus percent—of the game, you’ll be dredging from one destination to the next, often retreading your steps, and always battling three to four terrorists every few seconds using your trusty tapping attack.
In light of this fact, seeing as the D-pad isn’t currently used for anything at all practical, it would have been infinitely more helpful if it could have assumed some sort of role in the realm of camera control, perhaps with left/right controlling camera rotation and up/down providing limited zoom capability. At the very worst, the option should have been made available.
Not so Elite
Each of your characters in Elite Forces has his/her own unique special ability. These include the previously-discussed sniping, driving vehicles (controlled like walking, but faster), disarming land mines, and wielding a bazooka. For the most part, these abilities provide a much-needed tactical layer to an otherwise pretty repetitive blend of action. However, their presence would have been much more helpful if they were widely useful and easy to control. Not so, regretfully: the need to gather ammunition for the sniper rifle also limits the bazooka’s utility, and none of the special moves are easy to control. Toggling them on and off isn’t the problem; you can do that with the shoulder buttons. The issue is that it takes forever to toss a grenade or fire your bazooka, and driving vehicles with the stylus feels like… well, like you’re driving with a stylus. The vehicles also succumb to enemy fire far too quickly, meaning that you’re unlikely to rely on these added techniques any more than is required of you by the game’s objectives.
It’s also helpful to know precisely what it is you’re supposed to be doing, but tragically, Elite Forces isn’t always so clear about that, either. I’ll share with you my experiences on the subject. In one particular mission (the fourth one, to be exact), one of the objectives is to destroy a bit of machinery using some C-4 explosives you pick up on the opposite side of the enemy base. You get two explosives upon pickup, and then you’ve got to walk all the way to the top of the map to the location you’re targeting. There’s a helpful little animated icon on the map specifying where it is you’ll need to place the explosives, so with my eye on that indicator, I made my way up, set my explosive on the machine, and stepped back. Loud noise, then nothing. I’m puzzled, so I do the same thing again, but this time in a slightly different position (still within the indicated area). Again—nothing. At this point I’m wondering what the heck I’m doing wrong. It’s bad enough that I’ve done precisely what was asked of me twice, but at the very least, the game could inform me that I’ll have to pick up more explosives and try again; it doesn’t.
Just after this point (oddly enough), the very next thing you’re asked to do is rescue a couple of hostages elsewhere in the base. Upon reaching their location (don’t forget—this entire time, you’re being accosted by those infinite waves of three or four red dots), a short dialogue reveals that I’ll need an armored vehicle to escort them to safety. “Sure,” I think. “I’ve seen plenty of heavy-duty trucks around the base; I’ll just find one of those and I’m good to go.” So I do, and I begin driving it to the hostages. Perhaps my first clue that something was amiss should have been the fact that the truck only makes it around 20 feet before exploding in the face of hostile fire… but being the persistent and creative gamer that I am, I wisely disembark my other two teammates from the next truck I find and walk them in front of it, disposing of any hostiles in its path on the way to pick up the hostages. This gets the truck to the hostages fairly easily and quickly. But what happens when I reach them? Absolutely nothing. They continue pacing around mindlessly as I frantically try to reposition the truck to convince them to come along. Nothing works. Does the game bother to inform me that I’ve brought the wrong vehicle to collect them? Of course not—so it’s another ten minutes of scouring the base before I finally discover that there is but a single completely different vehicle, more heavily-armored, which is meant for the task.
It’s these sorts of completely preventable infractions coupled with the subpar combat gameplay central to the experience that make Elite Forces seriously tough to enjoy. Although the missions become quite lengthy around halfway through the experience (which is where I stopped playing to write this review), the tedium of battling so many soldiers in exactly the same manner and the fact that losing even just one member of your three-person squad spells the end of the mission means you’re highly unlikely to make it any further than I did. Yes, there are mid-level save points, thank heavens. But your frequently stupid teammates don’t seem all that interested in keeping themselves alive, as they’re slow to fire back at the enemy without your command, they cannot heal themselves when low on energy, and they even decided to walk into a mine while I was disarming it at least a couple of times. Even if they don’t end up dead, they’ll occasionally find a way to get themselves stuck behind some sort of object. It’s just a pain, plain and simple.
The whole experience is just, quite frankly, not very fun. And that’s a shame, too, because the game engine is nice, and the feel of the presentation is refreshingly old-school. With better controls, a more enticing assortment of action, a little more debugging, and a much thicker layer of polish, this might have been a very different story indeed.