Curse those snoopy journalists. If only they'd have kept their nose out of my business and put some distance between themselves and the battle I was engaged in - they'd still be one news van up and I'd still have enough money to requisition that tank I desperately need. Now I have to send my squad of soldiers and jeeps through a town crawling with snipers and tanks, and all with no support. Thanks for making my job harder.

But that's their job, isn't it? To report to the world the mistakes I make fighting in wars that nobody really wants. Dead civilians, burnt-out aid convoys, blown up news trucks… as soon as these images are broadcast around the world that's my funding kissed goodbye. I suppose it's fortunate for me that the media of Joint Task Force are nowhere near as dedicated as the media of the real world, or I'd have been screwed the moment my feet touched the ground.

There's one great idea in Joint Task Force, but it's an idea that just doesn't seem to go anywhere. The game, putting you in command of the aforementioned JTF, a version of the UN who aren't afraid to get their hands dirty, tricks you into believing that the media can ultimately make or break your missions as they follow you to some of the world's most volatile hotspots. Do well and they report on your success through occasional news updates, do badly and they report on your mistakes, subsequently affecting how you later proceed.

There are no resources to gather in JTF, money is instead gained from completing primary or optional objectives, and with such cash rewards being rather limited, every bit counts. Trouble arises when you plough through missions with disregard for the people you are there to protect - kill innocent bystanders and as soon as the media gets wind of it, they plaster your handy work all over the nightly news, effectively forcing your superiors to impose strict punishments, usually in the form of very hefty fines.

While the game attempts to drive home that nothing you do is safe from the watchful gaze of the media, it's a feature that just never plays as prominent a role as was obviously intended. Sure, they jump all over you the second you machine gun down groups of civilians and blow up medical trucks (which are surprisingly easy to avoid unless you go out to do them purposefully) but demolishing a small suburb with air strikes? Nothing. We're supposed to feel like every move we make is one that could potentially land us in trouble, forcing us to think about our actions before we proceed. It doesn't - it's just a nice idea that too often goes unnoticed. With that said, I am beginning to wonder whether having your actions scrutinised in such a way would have been such a good idea for a game that loves war so much anyway.

There's a degree of realism throughout, from the lovingly recreated tanks and helicopters to the hassle of flying in heavy logistical armour. You often begin each level with the bare minimum of forces, a few soldiers and if you're lucky maybe a jeep or APC. As with most RTS games, heroes also play an important role, here especially so, as they are the only ones with the ability to expand your forces. Reinforcements can be purchased by heroes in the form of air strikes, helicopters, troops or small vehicles, but the realism means that rather than simply appearing on the map, these units have to be flown in by helicopter, forcing you to scour out any anti-aircraft weaponry before all that money you spend gets shot down in hail of fire. Heavier weapons such as tanks and artillery have to be specially flown in by plane and are only accessible once you've found and captured the level's local airport.

More often than not, thanks to the trouble of capturing airports and the huge costs involved with buying heavy weapons, you're forced to focus on your smaller forces. The lone soldiers of JTF are a hardier bunch than in most strategy games, having the ability to upgrade their secondary weapons with anything from C4 explosives to anti-tank weapons. They also gain experience points as they progress, but rather than just making them faster and more agile, the experience can eventually turn them into brand new hero characters, with new abilities.

This is great, except that actually getting soldiers to gather the experience they need to become new hero characters is extremely difficult. All of the units you command are fragile; soldiers can be pulverised with a few well placed shots from an enemy APC or tank, making mad dashes across maps as perilous as if you where sending them directly into an enemy base surrounded by machine gun nests and minefields. Worse still is that your main heroes, the mission critical ones who accompany you throughout much of the game, are just as vulnerable. I lost count of the amount of times I had to reload or restart a level because while preoccupied elsewhere in the game my hero, who I left in what I assumed was relative safety, got killed when an enemy tank rolled into view and shot him dead before I had chance to react.

But as things progress, your reliance on newer, bigger weapons takes precedent over your smaller weaker forces. This game revels in mass carnage - things don't just blow up, they explode into a thousand pieces, sending debris and rubble hurling through the air in spectacularly over the top fashion. Bodies fly and contort when hit by heavy weapons, making you feel the force of the units under your command. Then there are the specialist units - Harrier jump jets that unleash a barrage of destruction from their deadly payload or missile spewing artillery. Who cares that they can be used to coerce the town's local warlord out of hiding? I just want to see the destruction they can unleash!

The impressive physics-based graphics do make the action a lot more digestible and the inclusion of rag-doll physics is also a nice addition, but with all that additional power comes the occasional and very disheartening technical problems. Drops in framrate can get especially bad in larger battles, dragging the action to a crawl. This may not affect those who actually went out and spent £200 on one of those new Physics cards, as JTF fully supports them, but for the rest of us it's a problem that rears its head more times that it should.

Heavy units can also be a chore to maintain, their armour just as susceptible to enemy weapons as soldiers are. Taking a group of tanks from one end of a map to the other can become a tiresome sequence of manoeuvring, attacking and re-supplying. Attacks can cripple vehicles enough that rarely do you get the chance to just soldier on, as doing so will likely result in the destruction of your forces, and with that ever looming problem of limited funding preventing you from simply rolling out tank after tank, you are constantly forced to adapt to your units' fragility.

The micromanaging involved with maintaining your forces can become tiresome, especially when you take into consideration that even supply trucks need continuous re-supplying and certain units such as attack helicopters and missile-launching artillery require re-arming after every salvo. Even when sped up, instances in which you must repair and supply your forces can drag on unnecessarily.

These are problems, but problems you can learn to live with - rubbish AI on the other hand is something that no gamer should be burdened with, and unfortunately JTF's biggest folly is in the stupidity of its digitised AI minions. I'll give them some credit; soldiers do use whichever weapons are appropriate for whichever target they engage without the need for you to step and tell them. They won't, however, seek out an enemy unit just off the screen, even after they've been fired upon. Worse yet is the pathfinding, which makes mass gatherings of troops and tanks a needlessly difficult task. Given how narrow some of the roads are that you have to traverse, it would have been a great help if the tanks you command actually had the capacity to navigate the rough terrain without it turning into an epic struggle. The worst bit so far? My entire invasion plans halted when all of my units decided to cross a bridge at the same time! The next few minutes were spent reversing each unit and sending them over one by one - what fun.

Yet despite the problems it throws at you, JTF is still an accessible and enjoyable game. Its five campaigns take you to such places as Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq, and they're a varied bunch stretching from deserts and jungles to city streets; it's never a dull game to explore and with its often varied objectives that can occasionally just pop up out of nowhere, it never gets repetitive. There are some commendable aspects of JTF in its attempt to draw on today's media obsession over current wars and their effectiveness at swinging public opinion, an idea that just never gets its feet off the ground, and its added realism does make what are usually very simple tasks in strategy games considerably more difficult, forcing you to make do with what you've got rather than simply swarming the enemy until success. But JTF is also a game riddled with faults - its nice but system hungry graphics, the more trouble than it's worth AI and the needless micromanaging of your forces that can slow the game down.

Joint Task Force is a decent enough, varied and often fun game that could and should have been more, but as it stands, while it strived for more ambitious goals, in the end it's just your typical RTS with killer looks and some nice, underdeveloped ideas. It's a worthy addition to the genre, but one that should only be approached by those who have the patience to see it through to the end.

Reviewed by Kieron Giacopazzi for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).