Delta Force Review – IGN

Delta Force Review – IGN

“First-person shooter” is a broad term. It can mean everything from an action-horror game like F.E.A.R., to a sci-fi adventure like Metroid Prime, to a demon-eviscerating romp like Doom. Even narrowing it down to a sub-category like “military FPS” still puts the linear campaign of Call of Duty, the enormous PvP clashes of Battlefield, and the white-knuckle extractions of Escape from Tarkov (among others) under a single umbrella. Delta Force, the latest revival of a now 26-year-old shooter series last seen in 2009, is probably best defined as a bit of each of those last two – with a dedicated large-scale PvP mode and a separate extraction shooter mode, it sits somewhat awkwardly at the center of that Venn diagram. As a result, it’s a free-to-play one-stop shop of “just fine”: It’s competent all around, but doesn’t distinguish itself in battle with any substantial new ideas.

While Delta is officially “out,” (whatever that means anymore) only two of the three main modes are currently available. The third, a single-player campaign, is planned as paid DLC somewhere down the line. Of the two that are here now, the Warfare mode is Delta Force’s version of the big team combat of Battlefield, where 64 players duke it out for supremacy across one of a handful of sprawling arenas. There is no straight kill-focused Deathmatch; instead, the focus is on objective-based games like King of the Hill variants. The standout among these is Attack and Defend, which has one team capturing strategic points before running out of a finite number of respawns, while the other team defends those areas with limitless lives. It’s a subtle rule change that does put a good spin on a mode we’ve seen a ton of in Battlefield; initially, the offense has the advantage thanks to favorable terrain and an abundance of vehicles, but things even out as the match progresses and the defense retreats toward their home base and has quick access to respawned reinforcements. This means each side typically gets to spend some time as both the figurative hammer and the nail.