The Concept

Developer: Barking Dog Studios
Publisher: Crave Entertainment
Global Operations official page: http://www.globalopsgame.com/

Counter-Strike with Class

Which two mods took Half-Life from a singleplayer superpower to a multiplayer god? First, there was Team Fortress Classic. Next, came Counter-Strike. TFC was a refinement on the old Team Fortress mod for Quake, and really had no major innovative elements. Counter-Strike was a whole new animal. Take team deathmatch with permanent deaths, objective-oriented play, asymmetric maps, throw in unequal weapons and a performance-rewarding economy system and you’ve got some idea of how different it was when it first came out.

Mean-looking logo

Your mission, should you choose to accept

These are your objectives!

It’s not hard to come up with a revolutionary concept, but making it work is. Thus, for the past little while we’ve seen people copycat both mods with little innovation. Global Operations takes a major part of TFC – the class system – and integrates it into the objective-oriented team deathmatch of Counter-Strike. This evolutionary approach makes a great deal of sense at first glance, though no one can tell if the gaming public picks up on the idea.

The teams

Global Operations doesn’t place the players in a generic “terrorist” or “counter-terrorist” role. Instead, they take on the identities of specific teams – military, para-military or even civilian enforcement. Terrorists can be full-fledged rebels or just rabble-rousers. Each mission has a small back story which helps outline the general objectives that the teams have to achieve.

Choose your class

Damn dark on those choppers

Go go go!

Those objectives vary quite a bit more than players may be used to, and sometimes a team has more than one objective. Some missions are almost like Assault missions from Unreal Tournament, where a team has to accomplish a series of objectives – each unlocking the next. An example of this is the Russians needing to take out anti-aircraft units to deliver an airstrike, which clears a mountain pass. Once the pass is cleared, then the team can go in to assassinate a local terrorist cell leader.

The third mission in the game has the counter-terrorists going in as Canadian Special Forces units (we have special forces? Holy cow! -Jakub). Their job is to capture an escaped Turkish terrorist who’s being led by his comrades to an extraction point. Since he is a prisoner yet to be convicted, assassination is not an option. Thus, the teams fight for control of the prisoner, leading him to and from each other’s escape points.

All semblance of squad warfare has been lost

Human one moment, a pile of goo the next

Lookie lookie I got hookie

Naturally, there are plenty of ‘normal’ bomb/protection missions as well. One thing that is different from Counter-Strike is that death is not permanent. Rather, respawning works like it does in Wolfenstein, with a reinforcement round every thirty seconds or so. During reinforcement, players can switch classes or buy weapons and equipment.