Delta Force

Overview

If you liked playing army as a kid, you’ll love NovaLogic’s Delta Force. Players use military combat skills to outfox and outgun enemies in single play or multiplayer modes. Anyone can jump right into a game. It’s so easy that training missions are not even offered. But don’t expect a point-and-click arcade-style fragfest. It will take a little time to master the environment of Delta Force.

Gameplay, Controls, Interface

Each of the six campaigns contains about eight or so missions. Upon completing the first mission, you might see one or two more appear from which to select. Complete one of those and a few more appear. I like this nonlinear approach.

Typical missions put the Delta Force squad capturing an enemy base or infiltrating a camp. Some missions are quite unique though. My favorite was rescuing two downed chopper pilots who must survive in order to complete the mission. The convoy escort mission had great potential but tended to bog with all the activity. There is quite a rewarding feeling after completing a mission. However, I really found myself wanting to command the other members of my squad to pass off some of the heavy lifting.

In the distance you might see the ubiquitous flock of birds which seem to be in all games now regardless of the genre. Everything is peaceful until either you attack or are spotted. When the first bullet impacts at close range, you kind of stumble and see red. The next hit brings you down.

I rather enjoyed lobbing grenades into single file columns of enemy troops and watching their frightful reactions. Enemies scatter like ants when gunfire interrupts them. They begin running and ducking and and dodging fire. They also shoot back. I experienced a good sense of being pinned down as often seen in war movies.

How each Delta Force weapon benefits you depends on the task at hand. In every mission you can customize your package by choosing a primary weapon, secondary weapon, and sidearm. Let’s look at the weapons and their uses: Knife—works well as a stealth weapon or last resort. Special Operations .45 Pistol—powerful, accurate, good for sudden close encounters. High Standard .22 Pistol—ineffectual, but a quiet close range gun. Barrett Light .50 caliber Sniper Rifle—best long range cherry picker. M249 SAW (Squad Automatic Weapon)—the most powerful gun, great for smashing up convoys. M4 5.56 Carbine Assault Rifle—the most versatile gun, has a grenade launcher and scope. M40A1 Sniper Rifle—useful for accurate, short range sniping. Heckler & Koch 9MM MP5 SD Submachine Gun—has a silencer, stealth over firepower. Grenade—deadly but shrapnel makes it dangerous at close range. LAW (Light Antitank Weapon)—penetrates armor and about anything else. M18 Claymore Mines—nice but not very useful since most missions have the player in an offensive rather than defensive role. Satchel Charges—will destroy anything if you can get to the target, plant the charge, and escape without being hit by enemy fire.

Multiplayer Support

After trying my first network game on NovaWorld (NovaLogic’s free servers), I was amazed at how quickly two or three hours passed. Delta Force offers a variety of online gameplay modes: Cooperative, Deathmatch, King of the Hill, and Capture the Flag. NovaLogic encourages formation of squads and even sponsors tournaments.

The only frustration I had was that there often seemed to be nowhere to hide from distant but deadly sniper fire. Numerous times I caught bullets while running for cover. I had no idea where my assassin had been. I discovered that crawling made me slightly stealthier, but slowed movement.

Graphics

NovaLogic’s Voxelspace graphics engine has been a stumbling block for some, a joy for others. Whether it’s Quake 2 or Spec Ops or Rainbow 6, today’s graphics all begin to look alike after a while. Most anyone will notice the sort of artistic look of the Voxelspace 3 engine. "Classy but different" best describes Delta Force’s look. The crux is that Voxelspace technology (3D pixels) allows greater distance and sloping terrain.

In the third-person view, you see the player’s head and torso move up and down. At times a beautiful purple sky covers a snowy terrain. On a clear day you can see cumulus clouds gracefully moving overhead. Weapons, vehicles, and structures all have a defined look.

Audio

A big positive for the game was the sound quality. I noticed a more military-style inventory of sounds than one might expect from the average first-person shooter. From the faint chirping of birds and breezes blowing, to the terrifying screams and gurgles of unfortunate victims, the sounds draw the player into the Delta Force world. Enemies yell in their native tongues while attacking you.

System Requirements

Windows 95/98/NT, P166 MMX (PII recommended), 32 MB minimum (64 recommended), 4X CD-ROM drive, Windows 95/98 video card, mouse.

Internet play with 16-32 players via NovaWorld servers requires Internet service provider, direct serial play requires null modem and cable (two players), modem play requires minimum 14.4 Kbps modem (two players), network play requires IPX network adapter (up to eight players) minimum DirectX 5 (DirectX included). Only one CD is required for non-Internet multiplayer games.

Documentation

In the typical NovaLogic spirit of user-friendliness, a concise and easy-to-understand manual is all the player needs. Since the game itself is not vastly complicated, I can’t imagine a need for more. The most important items are the explanation of key commands and description of weapons.

Bottom Line

To my surprise, Delta Force is one of the most fun games I have played all year. Whether or not you became bogged down in the tedious mission planning of Rainbow Six or annoyed by the controls in Spec Ops, Delta Force will entertain you. Add the ability to issue team orders, graphics acceleration, and a mission builder; and this title would be nearly perfect.

Delta Force is a 1998 FPS shooter with a lot of nostalgia factor for older players. The game is a tactical shooting game at its finest, with dozens of missions to play, enemies to kill, and options that were innovative for its time. Most modern FPS games got their roots in some way from Delta Force, which was among the first to offer some detail in the 3D backgrounds, a female character option, and an “alert” system that made stealth an option.

5 Campaigns

Games like Call of Duty that are now icons of the field often took bits of inspiration from this game. Delta Force offers a relatively generous 5 campaigns, with 40 missions across them. These missions are relatively varied but lack replayability due to the fairly dumb AI of the game. While the AI was innovative for the time, with enemies not noticing you until you make a noise or come into view, they always do the exact same thing.

Once you have learned the movements of an enemy, you can expect them to always be there, all the time. They never leave that path. This means you’ll never have to go searching once you know where they are. Even lacking replayability in this way, you still get a solid 18-20 hours of gameplay to enjoy. That’s a pretty solid amount of time, especially considering it is an older game.

Varied games

A nice feature of the game is it’s not an endless grind of “Find and destroy the base.” While there are plenty of those, the missions change up fairly frequently. Sometimes you’ll be rescueing another person, sometimes you’ll be ambushing a convoy, and one time you’ll be using lasers to tag targets for a bombardment.

Many newer games could take a lesson from this variation in gameplay, which makes the next mission exciting rather than just another grind.

Multiplayer available

You can also join your friends in this game and take on some of the missions together. This certainly makes the game more fun. You can also play with AI, but AI companions aren’t exactly useful and often die at incredible rates.

Great Sound

The sound of the game is some of the best out there. Suppressed gunfire sounds realistic, and large guns boom appropriately. When combined in a multiplayer environment, it genuinely sounds like you are in a real battlefield.

This game has managed to stay relevant even decades later. Although it clearly can’t compare to the newest and most modern games, it doesn’t need to. Delta Force is a classic that brought some of the first innovations to FPS out there to the gaming community.

Pros:

• Superior sound effects
• Great variation in missions
• Nostalgia factor

Cons:

• AI is as dumb as a box of rocks
• Graphics are dated