Delta Force reviewCome for the battles, stay for the extraction shooting, avoid the atrocious campaign.Image credit: Eurogamer/TiMi Studios Group Review by Rick Lane Contributor Published on Feb. 26, 2025 An entertaining one-stop-shop for competitive multiplayer action, but the recently released Black Hawk Down campaign is an unpleasant war simulation in all the wrong ways.Partial as I am to a thunderous multiplayer gunfest, I've been firmly in Delta Force's camp since it was revealed in 2023. The bipartisan military junta of Battlefield and Call of Duty is in dire need of a shake-up, and the passion Team Jade seemingly has for Delta Force - a somewhat forgotten series in the West, but a cultural phenomenon in China where the studio is based - made me hopeful its take on big-budget buddy blasting would help change the tune for this particular strand of first-person shooting.Delta Force reviewDeveloper: Team JadePublisher: TiMi Studios GroupPlatform: Played on PCAvailabilty: Out now on PC (Steam, Epic Games Store), coming soon for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Android and iOSAs it turns out, Delta Force mainly adds to the noise. Its multiplayer spins on large-scale combat and squad-based extractions are meticulously designed and undeniably entertaining. But they're also structurally conservative, only making minor tweaks to otherwise familiar formulas. Team Jade makes bolder decisions in its recently released cooperative campaign, Black Hawk Down, but these ideas are underdeveloped and poorly executed, leading to a desperately unpleasant experience Delta Force may have been better off without.We'll start with this newest addition to Delta Force, which was added to the free-to-play shooter just last week. Set during the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993, Delta Force: Black Hawk Down is supposedly a remake of the 2003 game of the same name, generally considered the strongest entry in the series developed by its original steward Novalogic. Unlike that game, however, Team Jade's campaign is also an officially licensed tie-in for Ridley Scott's 2001 film, featuring in-engine cutscenes that recite lines and mimic shots from Scott's movie, as well as actual clips from the film itself, primarily in the campaign's introduction. Such a licensing deal would have made perfect sense for Novalogic's game back in 2003, if the studio had the finances to afford it. But Ridley Scott's film is nearly 25 years old, which makes Team Jade wrapping its campaign in that particular flag a bit strange. Watch on YouTubeThis isn't the only puzzling aspect to Black Hawk Down's relationship with its source material. For some reason, Team Jade has only remade about half of the 2003 campaign. This modern Black Hawk Down kicks off the action with the mission 'Irene', the eleventh mission in Novalogic's campaign, and the point at which Delta Force and the US Rangers commence their raid to capture the advisors to General Aidid. In fairness, Team Jade's work isn't meant to be a precise replication of Novalogic's, but the fact it still only features seven missions to Novalogic's sixteen seems odd, to say the least. Moreover, these missions are extremely short. If you could run through them unhindered, Delta Force could well clock in at a shorter running time than the film. Team Jade's solution to this is twofold. First, it ensures you cannot run - standard character movement is extremely slow, while your sprint is more like a light jog. Second, it ensures you are extremely hindered. Black Hawk Down is a brutally punishing affair. Enemies come at you constantly from all angles, popping out of every aperture like clowns emerging from a car. Just a few shots can put your character down, and there are no save points whatsoever. If your squad is wiped, you must restart the mission entirely. Look, I know it's based on a real event and the politics behind the battle of Mogadishu are extremely complex, but the optics of a game in which you shoot endless waves of black people ain't great. Image credit: Eurogamer/TiMi Studios GroupNow, I don't mind the difficulty of the shooting itself, although the challenge relies far too much on rote learning of enemy placements rather than actual tactics. Nor do I mind the sluggish movement or general feel of the combat. The way it makes you feel overwhelmed feels true to Scott's depiction of the same events, and your inherent vulnerability means the tension is constantly ratcheted to maximum. Every corner you peek around feels like a roll of the dice, while watching a grenade skitter across the floor to stop dead at your feet is utterly terrifying.The problem is that the combat's general challenge is served with a heaped side-order of bullshit. If an enemy gets close to you, they can perform a melee attack which will instantly knock you down. Rocket troops are everywhere and lethally accurate in the fire, and there are several instances where their attacks are so incessant that it's nearly impossible to move forward - your world engulfed by constant smoke and tinnitus. Meanwhile, your own ordnance, which is limited mainly to grenades, don't seem to work unless enemies are already alerted to your presence, making them useless for clearing rooms. Standing in a doorway like this is risky business in Black Hawk Down. | Image credit: Eurogamer/TiMi Studios GroupLikewise, the structure of the missions often feels at odds with the game's emphasis on methodical play, usually to service either Novalogic's designs or scenes from the film. One mission, for example, sees you play as the doomed snipers defending an injured Black Hawk pilot, while another is an on-rails turret section where you drive a convoy of Humvees through a nightmare gauntlet of rocket troops. Several other missions require you to escort vehicle convoys on foot through the streets of Mogadishu, which do not stop regardless of how heavy the fighting is. If they stray too far ahead, it's game over, though in a twisted kind of mercy, they'll usually be obliterated by rocket spam long before this happens, helping you fail slightly faster.All of this makes the campaign virtually impossible to play through solo, so you'll need either a group of friends to play with, or roll the dice on Internet randoms - though even with two or three players, I still found it was a big ask. To their credit, the players I ended up bundled with were bloody marvellous on the whole, especially when you consider the campaign's communication tools are either absent or broken. Both text and voice chat seemed inoperable during missions for me, and the only other squad command available is a rudimentary target/location pointing system. This makes it difficult to work together tactically, or even perform basic tasks such as requesting ammo from other players (which is the only way you can replenish ammo during a mission, by the way). This led to me standing in front of another player and frantically reloading my gun like some military mime, until he got the message that I was running low on ammunition. God bless you, nastyMammoth and Zvedz83, you helped me through some difficult times. | Image credit: Eurogamer/TiMi Studios GroupThe only real plus here is that Black Hawk Down is free, and you can play it without investing any time or money into Delta Force's multiplayer modes. Sadly, it being free is also the best thing about this campaign. There are some half-decent moments, like the third mission where you must pick through a Mogadishu market riddled with ambushes, and the whole thing looks snazzy in Unreal Engine 5, especially the scenes where you fly over the ctiy's rooftops, rockets crisscrossing through the sky. Overall, though, it's a bust. Too short, too basic, and lacking a clear design direction.Fortunately, the competitive multiplayer is both far bigger and far better. At time of writing, Delta Force's multiplayer is split into two broad modes named Warfare and Operations. We'll address Warfare first, as its the most conventional of the two, unashamedly mimicking the structure of Battlefield in its adaptations of DICE's Rush and Conquest modes. The former sees two teams in attacking and defending roles fighting for a set sequence of hardpoints along a shifting frontline, while the latter involves battling for control points across a more open-ended map. The brief flyovers of Mogadishu are probably the highlights of the campaign, if only to see Unreal Engine 5 in full effect. | Image credit: Eurogamer/TiMi Studios GroupAs such, warfare comes with most of the same advantages and drawbacks of playing Battlefield multiplayer. The sense of scale and destructive firepower on show is utterly thrilling, with player-driven action happening all around you, and lots of fun ad-hoc coordination between your specific squad and your broader team. But you'll still get regularly ganked by preposterously accurate snipers hidden in the farthest reaches of the map, and SMG-wielding teenagers with L-shaped eyes ambushing you from around corners. Attack and Defend also suffers from that same, age-old problem of turning into attritional grinds over specific hardpoints, with dozens of players piling into the same few square metres of the map in an unreadable mush of munitions.The one notable difference is how Delta Force approaches battlefield roles, with players selecting from nine "Operators" rather than four classes. These operators still fall roughly into the four familiar Battlefield roles (Assault, Engineer, Support, Recon), but their special abilities provide a slightly different twist on each. Taking the assault class as an example, D-Wolf has a powered exoskeleton on his legs, enabling him to run at high speeds, and he also comes equipped with a triple-firing grenade launcher with projectiles that stick to vehicles. This lets him get in and out of the action very quickly, while also enabling him to play chicken with the enemy's mechanised forces. Vyron, by comparison has a jump pack that lets him quickly boost forward in short bursts, and also negate fall damage, which provides him a slightly different array of movement options. Playing as a team is essential in Black Hawk Down, and even then, expect a punishing ride. | Image credit: Eurogamer/TiMi Studios GroupIt's hardly radical stuff, but in the absence of a proper new Battlefield, Delta Force's warfare is a perfectly acceptable alternative. Team Jade does offer some more interesting ideas in its Operations mode, however. This is Delta Force's spin on the extraction shooter, popularised by games like Hunt: Showdown and Escape from Tarkov. Playing solo or in teams of up to three, it sees you dropping by helicopter into large open maps to fill your pockets with guns and goodies, before exfiltrating at one of several set points in the map. If you die, you lose everything you're carrying.Well, almost everything.Extraction shooters are notoriously tough, uncompromising affairs, so Team Jade's version is designed to make the subgenre more accessible. For example, when in the field, you can place a few small items in a "safe box" that will carry through with you even upon death. Players killed at lower levels are also compensated after the fact with a package of basic equipment, which takes some of the sting out of dying and makes gearing up for the next fight quicker. Operations' most interesting idea, though, is how it infuses the freeform extraction loop with more structured missions. Zero Dam features a scale model of its own map. That's it. That's the caption. | Image credit: Eurogamer/TiMi Studios GroupThese missions are not especially involved. They might require you to kill specific enemies, or use a specific weapon, or investigate certain parts of the map. Nonetheless, the rewards make them worth pursuing and I like how they gradually acquaint players with different parts of the experience, encouraging you to try different loadouts or participating in various in-map activities. Combined with the other, smaller ideas Team Jade implements, it means you nearly always emerge from a battle with something, even if you don't nab the best loot or, indeed, survive.Operations is also where Delta Force's gunplay feels most at home. Delta Force splits the difference between an arcade feel to its guns and a more hardcore approach where bullet drop and travel time are more accurately simulated. This works well enough in Warfare, but feels better attuned to Operations' brief bursts of combat. I also just enjoy how much sound plays a role in your experience. Every noise both players and NPCs make propagates across the map, right down to their footsteps. So every time you hear boots crunching into the ground, you listen intently to decipher whether they're a player or an AI goon. Actually firing your weapon, meanwhile, feels almost profane. Each Operations map has its own little twist, like the moving train in Laylani Grove. | Image credit: Eurogamer/TiMi Studios GroupThere are a couple of things I like less about Operations. Ironically, the presence of operators in this mode feels like it runs counter to its premise. Your prowess in extraction shooters is usually defined by the gear you acquire, so layering in character specific abilities on top just feels a bit inelegant. Also, Operations is crying out for a solo mode. It does let you drop into maps on your own, but you're in the mix with teams of two or three, and finding a team to complete specific missions with can be challenging.It's a shame that Delta Force's campaign is such a misfire, as a decent story mode that catered to solo players as well as teams would have elevated the entire package. Yet even without it, Delta Force does just about enough to make it a worthy alternative to the other military shooters around right now. Its individual modes might not be wildly original in and of themselves (although Operations does more to distinguish itself than Warfare), but the ability to hop from massive cacophonous battles into more methodical, squad-based adventures does have a novelty, and Delta Force does both well enough that they equally reward your time.Eurogamer sourced its own copy of Delta Force for this review, playing the public free-to-play version available to all at time of writing.