Global Operations

Global Operations is another entry by Electronic Arts into the first person action shooter market, launched almost alongside its other highly successful titles, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and Command and Conquer: Renegade. Primarily a multiplayer game, Global Operations is attempting to follow the success of other tactical action shooters such as Counter-Strike, Ghost Recon and Operation Flashpoint with a focus on current day combat, with realistic locations, weapons and tools.

Breaching the chinks in the armour of games like Counter-Strike at this stage is definitely something that isn't going to be easy, but it something that is very important to the success of a game like Global Operations, which is almost built from the ground up to be a direct competitor - and as a multiplayer online game, it has a lot to compete against. Counter-Strike, for example, has a very established and fanatically loyal user base, as well as being built on tried and tested technology.

As this game is fairly obviously aimed at getting a piece of this very significant market, I'll be drawing a few comparisons between Global Operations and Counter-Strike to illustrate certain points. One thing that is very important to remember though is that the technology that Half-Life is built on is several years old, and is also based on existing Quake technology. As a result, it has gone through a very extensive usage process and has been seriously optimised for performance. Global Operations is built on a modified version of the LithTech 2.5 engine, which hasn't really had the same level of attention or support. Additionally, the review is based on the out-of-the-box release version of the game, which will undoubtedly be updated with a series of patches and fixes to improve performance and fix problems as they arise.



Next: The Gameplay...