U.N. Food Force (Game Review)

04.22.2005

An aircraft circles over a crisis zone. War. Drought. People are hungry. This is the virtual world of the Food Force video game.

This is the tagline for the free downloadable game put out by the U.N.'s "World Food Programme" (WFP). Billed as an educational game designed to inform players about food relief efforts performed by the WFP, it is instead a vehicle by which the U.N. feeds not food to the hungry but tripe to players of the game.

The purpose of this review is to satisfy your curiosity without having to actually go through the agony of downloading and playing this sugar-coated misadventure in pixels. Now I realize this is a game targetted to children, so I realize it's not going to be very advanced game-play wise, but this unfortunately makes the indoctrinating aspects of this game all the more chilling.

Introduction

Players are first subjected to a semi-lengthy discussion of the game's premise, in this case the reason behind why the people of the (fictional) island of Shaylan are starving. This premise includes discussion not only of a local civil war but, somehow not suprisingly, even more prominently the idea that "global climate change" has caused a draught on the island contributing to food shortages there (causing a character in the game to at one point exclaim, "Unbelievable! The river is completely dry!"). Since civil war would have been reason enough for food shortage, this not-so-veiled reference to the popular, but thus far scientifically unproven, human-induced global warming was an unnecessary bit of political propaganda, in my view.

The game then introduces the player to the other people in the Food Force "team":

• Rachel Scott (who is, apparently, Lara Croft's less developed sister...), the Logistics Officer.
• Joe Zaki, the Nutritionist.
• Carlos Sanchez, an angry man who wears a goofy looking helmet.

The Missions

The player is then exposed to a chronological series of six missions, each of which are really individual mini-games glued together by the game's premise. As such, I review each individually as follows:

Mission 1 - Air Surveillance

Pilot a helicopter over a crisis zone in Sheylan to locate the hungry.

This mission is angrily introduced in a mission briefing by Carlos Sanchez. Played from a top down perspective, the player simply moves the mouse to change the helicopter's direction as it flies haphazardly over the map, as well as to shine a "spotlight" on the huddled masses of hungry pixels, using a coordinates grid map in the lower left corner to make sure you find everyone. This is similar to many older video games with this sort of "top-down" perspective (one great example of which is the old arcade game Xevious) - except that it is not actually fun.

Mission 2 - Energy Pacs (sic)

Within your budget, create a good balanced diet for the local population in Sheylan.

In this mission, Joe Zaki, the Nutritionist, explains that with absolutely no training whatsoever, you are to find the right combination of five different food items to create a formula for a nutritious food pac (sic) at a cost of $.30 per pac (sic) in a few minute time limit. Using sliders, the player then attempts to bumble their way through creating the correct formula. I finally realized that I had no clue how to win this mini-game and simply gave up and awaited the timer to count down to zero.

<yawn>

Mission 3 -

Drop food from the air if at first you lack cheaper routes into Sheylan.

The coolest part of Food Force (relative to the rest of the game, that is - this isn't saying much), this mission is, like Mission 1, angrily briefed by Carlos Sanchez. This mini-game gives you the simple task of air-dropping food into football field sized lengths of grass on Shaylan, while starving pixels await below.

The game mechanism by which you control the "push" of the food pallets out the back of your aircraft is similar to the golf video games I played years back, where the direction indicator swings back and forth, and it is the player's task to click the mouse when the indicator is pointing in the direction that will affect the optimum golf swing. In this case, the direction indicator and the player's click of the mouse button determines the "push", adjusting for wind drift, of the food pallet out the back of the airplane.

What this mission taught me was that evidently the UN needs to raise taxes... er, I mean membership dues, because the Food Force - despite being able to afford C-130's, can't seem to afford parachutes or any other speed-arresting device for their food drops. Instead, the pallets are simply dropped unrestrained to the ground where, if you miss the football field sized target, you are warned angrily by Carlos, "Careful! You could hit someobody!"

Mission 4 - Locate and Dispatch

Buy food and transport it to Sheylan as quickly and cheaply as you can.

In this mini-game, the player must fill a "food needs" puzzle, either by purchasing food or accepting gifts from governments around the world as cheaply as possible, using a world map to select appropriate purchases and gifts to feed the hungry pixels of Shaylan.

Notice the subtle message here - evidently, food relief only comes either through purchases by the UN (via some sort of international tax) or by gifts from governments. In the virtual world of the "UN Food Force", there are no private, non-government donations of food of any kind in times of need - we must, instead, look to our governments, or better yet, the UN, for help in times of need!!!

Mission 5 - Food Run

Guide a convoy of trucks safely to a WFP feeding centre (sic) in Sheylan. The trip won't be easy.

The trip was not only easy, but also quite boring. In this mini-game, your mission is to safely guide a convoy of food trucks to the "feeding centre" (sic). The briefing introduces you to several groups of sub-characters, such as truck mechanics and security personnel, and then you are sent on your way by Rachel Scott, who gives you the thumbs up (you can guess which finger I displayed as I drove off). While I thought this was going to be one of the more interesting mini-games (especially since they mentioned the cool sounding "security personel"!), it was actually quite disappointing.

While the top-down perspective might remind one of such classic arcade games as Spy Hunter, it's not actually even close to being as fun. In fact, while you have to steer the truck convoy along the route, you can't actually fail to stay on the road - in other words, there is no way to run off the road and crash. The "challenge," therefore, is actually contained in the route choices you make along the way. Each route choice (for example, choosing a rough, unpaved road vs another where rebels may be waiting to waylay your convoy) takes you to various possible mini-challenges, such as the following.

In one of two mini-challenges that I encountered, I found that (gasp!) the bridge was out along the route I had chosen. I then had the task of taking six bridge sections and placing them to create a proper bridge. While engineers were mentioned in the briefing for this mission, no explanation was made, of course, as to how we came upon the materials by which we replaced the washed out bridge. Nor was it explained how the bridge got washed out in the middle of a "global climate change" induced drought.

The other mini-challenge that I encounted was even more lame, despite the fact that it COULD have been cool. Having noticed the "security personnel" mentioned in the mission briefing, when I was given the choice between a rough, unpaved road one direction and another direction in which there were possibly going to be rebels waiting to ambush the convoy, I of course took the dangerous route, hoping to see some indication of how the security personnel might kick the rebel's asses. Instead, when we encountered the rebel's roadblock (who, for some reason, apparently had transported themselve to the roadblock in what looked to be American Army Jeeps) and they asked if we had any food in our trucks, I found that instead the security personnel were MIA and that it was left to me to try to talk my way past their blockade through a series of questions (by the rebel leader) and answers (provided by the game for me to choose from). I quickly found out that choosing a "wrong" answer, such as "ignore the rebels and smash through their blockade" or "lie to the rebels and say, there is no food in these trucks", gave me no ill consequences other than a large "WRONG!" flashing up on the screen, after which I was able to choose a different answer until I got the "right" answer. While I can't remember the exact question and answer sequence, the gist of the entire conversation was that if you are approached by a group of starving, heavily armed rebels, the best way to make friends with them and get past their blockade is to say you are from the U.N., that you actually do have vast amounts of food in your unprotected truck convoy, that the food is for the starving people of their country, and that it is by these qualifications that they should let you pass through their blockade unmolested. Thus, instead of being brutally murdered by the rebels, as would almost certainly happen in real life no matter what your answers were to their queries, in the virtual world of the "UN Food Force" you need only spout UN propaganda at the rebels and they pleasantly let you pass.

Mission 6 - Future Farming

Distribute food aid within a Sheylanese community to help the residents rebuild.

Probably the weakest mission of the six (which is saying alot), this mini-game really provided no identifiable challenge whatsoever. Seemingly modeled on so called "god games" such as Sim-City or Tropico, your task here is to distribute food to six different village rebuilding efforts, such as "School Feeding", "Nutrition" and "Food For Work", over a simulated ten year period, given a certain amount of "starting food" per year. Had this actually been modeled off of any of the various "god games" out there, where your decisions toward resource (in this case, food) distribution actually seem to mean something, this might have actually been a pretty cool aspect of this game. Instead, while I just simply distributed the food evenly amongst the six different possible areas (the video game equivalent of simply answering "C" on a multiple choice test, really) I actually did quite well by year 10, with two areas maxed out and the others at least 80% full, and the overall happiness of the formerly starving pixels of the village scored at around 95%.

Conclusion

After all the missions are completed, the player is then introduced to more WFP propaganda in the form of a short video, telling the player how wonderful the UN and WFP are. After the video, the player then has several choices, such as to replay any of the missions to increase his score, to upload his scores to the Food Force servers, or quit. Guess which of these I chose... :)

In short, while the Food Force touts itself as an "educational game," it is my opinion that it really fits neither into the "educational" nor the "game" category very well at all. Overall, therefore, this game rates two middle fingers up.

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Copyright © 2009 By Bob Curtis