The Wargamer

Air assault operations are conducted with speed, secrecy, and precision by a well trained, proficient combined arms team. To gain proficiency, individuals and units habitually conduct combined arms training in air assault operations before being committed to combat...

- U.S. Army Field Manual 90-4, Air Assault Operations

Air Assault Task Force, the latest tactical-level game released in December by ProSIM Company and Shrapnel Games, provides a virtual training environment for air assault operations. Players assume the role of task force commander and assign missions to companies and platoons. With its highly sophisticated AI, Air Assault Task Force allows players to exercise as much control as they feel comfortable with, from company-level missions to "attack here" or "defend this" to micromanaging the activities of individual vehicles and teams. It is about the closest players can get to actual multi-echelon combined arms training without feeling the prop blast from a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter and the smell of JP-4 aviation fuel wafting through the air.

ProSIM has steadily improved its games since first releasing BCT Commander and then ATF: Armored Task Force. Using the ATF Engine, the ProSim programming team continued to release new titles in the ATF series: Raging Tiger: The Second Korean War, The Falklands War: 1982, and The Star and the Crescent. While this "ATF Engine Project" was progressing over the past three years, ProSIM President Pat Proctor led the development effort for the Air Assault Task Force game engine and its brand new game design. But wait, that's not the end of the story for the old series. Air Assault Task Force was built to be 100% compatible with the previous ATF series games, which means it can be installed over these earlier games and the old scenarios played in this latest release with all of its new features. That is excellent news for players who own some or all of the other games in the ATF series, or may be interested in going back and getting them.

Over the past couple of months, Air Assault Task Force has received considerable pre-release attention, so much of what I will cover here may appear redundant. I already provided a thorough game preview back in October. Pat Proctor provided a couple of articles in November - Air Assault 101 and Air Assault Task Force Postmortem. In addition, a playable demo containing two tutorial scenarios has been available from ProSIM. For the folks who may not have been paying attention, the previous articles and the demo are worth checking out.

Introduction to Air Assault Operations

Air Assault Task Force is more than just a game. It is a worthwhile study of some of the historical battles of helicopter-borne infantry and how operations are conducted on the modern 3D tactical battlefield. Players begin their journey with two tutorial scenarios set at the Joint Readiness Training Center (JRTC) at Fort Polk, Louisiana. The first is a relatively simple airfield seizure by a company. The second is a more complicated air assault on a city by a battalion. To help new players, a FlashTM based tutorial provides guidance for learning the interface and playing the first tutorial scenario. Air Assault Task Force then presents three campaign missions. Take command of 1-7 Cav at Ia Drang in Vietnam in November 1965 and relive three bloody days of fighting on Landing Zone X-Ray. Players can then move on to Mogadishu, Somalia, in October 1993 and lead Special Operations forces against Somali warlords until rescued by coalition forces. Finally, they can choose the Shah-I-Kot valley in Afghanistan in March 2002 and conduct Operation Anaconda, where Task Force Rakassan routs Al Qaeda and Taliban forces. Each of these historical campaigns has four scenarios covering different aspects of the respective mission. Players can choose between the single missions or the campaign mission that merges the shorter scenarios together for each of the operations, and they may be played in any order.