Did you know that Delta Force: Black Hawk Down was a big hit in China? I certainly didn’t. But it was in the internet cafes of the 2000s that the spark for a new type of tactical shooter was first ignited. It was here that the founders of Tencent’s Team Jade fell in love with one of gaming’s earliest tactical shooters. Fast forward to NovaLogic’s sale of the IP to THQ in 2016 and Tencent’s wave of expansion into gaming, and voila! Delta Force is back.
“They saw an opportunity to bring back one of their favorite games,” said publishing director Wallace Wei during a preview of Delta Force: Operation Eagle in a Los Angeles hotel room. It was there that I got a brief hands-on opportunity to play around with this new take on the modern (even post-modern) tactical FPS. What I discovered was not one game, but two. Team Jade’s Delta Force is at least an attempt to please two groups of people at once: fans of the original 1998 FPS, and modern audiences completely unfamiliar with the IP. The mission is as fraught with danger as the game itself.
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What exactly are these two parts of Delta Force: Operation Eagle? The first is a modern remake of the original campaign. This is the one I’ve written about the least – I’ve only seen snippets of the game in trailers, and haven’t had a chance to test it myself. Wei told me during the preview that it’s a faithful recreation of the original campaign – the same levels and missions have been remade using Unreal Engine 5. It looks so faithful that Team Jade has also inserted clips from the Black Hawk Down movie between missions. This is a byproduct of purchasing the intellectual property from THQ, and a special link to the past.
What I was able to play for a long time were the two multiplayer modes, and it’s at this point that Delta Force: Operation Eagle Strike breaks away from its early 2000s roots. There are two modes: One is a tactical multiplayer mode that feels and sounds similar to EA’s Battlefield games, a slower, faster time-to-kill, squad-centric shooter experience that’s sure to lead to quick and meaningless deaths if you push it too far. The other half is more focused on a modern feel – an extraction shooter similar to Escape from Tarkov, where the slower tactical gameplay evolves into a desperate fight to scavenge and survive.
When asked about how they strike the balance between staying true to the original and appealing to a modern audience (something Hawk Ops clearly does with its multiplayer component), Wei said the developers won’t tamper with some of the foundational parts of the original.
“You have to keep some of the key pillars of the old series,” Wei explained. “So the game will feature an operator system like the old Delta Force, but at a slower pace. Also, we found that most of the old series players loved Black Hawk Down, so we wanted to faithfully remake the old single-player campaign. On top of that, we did some research and found that these players loved a multiplayer map called Cracked – so we’re bringing that back as well.”
One element I thought was particularly cool was the in-depth weapon customization system, which allows you to choose from dozens of individual attachments for your weapon of choice. Even better, much like recent Call of Duty games, you c an adjust the weight and balance of each attachment, resulting in subtle differences in weapon statistics like aiming speed and vertical recoil. This isn’t an entirely new feature, but it’s clearly been carefully crafted and reflects a love of the various guns and ammunition.
In my opinion, both traditional multiplayer and evacuation shooters feel good, but this game falls into a rut. Multiplayer is the 32v32 Battlefield-style experience you’ve probably played – I was able to pick off enemies from a distance with a sniper rifle, mow them down en masse with an LMG, and heal my team with a dedicated support class. This game is perfectly suited to my FPS tastes and is very much to my taste. But I foresee that this game will conflict with some of the strengths of Battlefield in the minds of many (or even fall short of it) – the Battlefield series is still the default king of the castle, even if it’s been a little rough around the edges lately.
The same is true of Extraction. It has bosses, contracts, a player auction house… It even has boxes for race skins that you can’t buy – you have to pick them up and unlock them in-game, sending notifications to every other player letting them know you’re doing it, and creating this exciting clash of cosmetics that I won’t deny my love for. It even has crocodiles that can attack you in rivers and streams. It’s awesome. You’d think now would be the perfect time to release a game like this, since Tarkov has been a huge PR disaster in recent weeks. But games of this type are becoming more and more controversial every month.
I’m not entirely sold on this idea. This game combines two completely different multiplayer modes into one package, while other studios focus on just one of them. You could say – and I’m sure Delta Force: Eagle players would say that – that’s great. It makes this game your one-stop shop for all things tactical FPS. But each of these individual modes is missing a key killer feature, a differentiator that would set it apart from its contemporaries. As it stands, this is a great game for those who haven’t invested a lot of time in the existing series.
Wei thinks both Battlefield and Tarkov are great, and says the team enjoys playing both games regularly, but feels Delta Force: Eagle Eye still has a place. “We admire their efforts, and we are working hard to get another new great game to the global audience.” [live] Service games. But I think we have our own rhythm. We have our own development process. So we don’t compare ourselves too much to those games.”
I point out that the game yes Mr. Wei believes that Delta Force Eagle is very similar to these games, so comparisons with Delta Force Eagle are inevitable. Mr. Wei responded: “We agree, but we think [our strengths are] We have multiple game modes in one game, and maybe we can go cross-platform, so if you buy the battle pass on one platform, you can get the full experience on another platform.”
So is Delta Force: Hawkeye worth playing? Well, it’s free, so it’s worth a try when it eventually releases. All the parts I played were fun, and it’s worth a try whether playing as a single player or with friends on Discord. While I’m not sure it’s going to revolutionize the genre, it’s a great revisit to a classic. For those who played the original, tactical FPS fanatics, and those with a history of playing in Chinese internet cafes, this game is well worth keeping an eye on.
Delta Force: Hawk Ops is a free-to-play first-person shooter game developed by Timi Studio.
