Ever since I first got into gaming, I’ve always been into first person shooters. I’ve probably spend months, if not years, of my life battling aliens in the Halo games or taking out whoever’s the bad guy of the year in the latest Call of Duty. Lately though, I find myself disillusioned with the major franchises. Battlefield 2042 was a disappointment, the Modern Warfare reboots ranged from mid to pretty bad, and Halo: Infinite was okay at best. This is where the devs at Team Jade dramatically rappell in, guns blazing.

Delta Force is a first person shooter that aims to lay low the stagnant titans of the FPS genre. At time of writing there are two game modes that take place in the 2030’s, Hazard Operations and Havoc Warfare, but a campaign mode that takes place in the early 90’s called Black Hawk Down has been teased.

Starting with the latest trend in shooters, the Hazard Operations game mode is an extraction shooter mode in the vein of Call of Duty’s Warzone or Escape from Tarkov. Hot drop into a city arena, gather loot, take out NPCs and other players, and extract with all your odds and ends intact. Admittedly, I find myself becoming weary of the overplayed trend of everything having an extraction game mode. The missions and a base-building aspect where certain materials you collect can be used to upgrade modules in your home base does give it a little more life, but personally this mode is not a huge seller for me. What I can say, is that this mode is built on the solid framework of good gunplay that supports the game as a whole but I’ll get into that later.

Jumping into the other major mode that’s out right now, Havoc Warfare, is more akin to the large-scale objective battles of the Battlefield games, but does a better job distinguishing itself than the Hazard Operations mode in my opinion. A typical match has the attacking team storming waves of sequential objectives with a dwindling pool of reinforcements and vehicles that gets refreshed with every successful wave. This puts a lot of pressure on attackers as the defenders have an unlimited pool of reinforcements, so making sure you revive and support your teammates is incredibly important. My one concern is that matches are going to most likely skew very heavily towards defenders since, as I’m sure many FPS vets will attest, getting teammates to play the objective is like herding cats into brain surgery.

In terms of features outside the game modes, there’s more combinations of things we’ve seen in other games. The roster of characters all have twists on abilities we’ve seen elsewhere. The medic’s healing gun can target multiple allies at once automatically and has a smoke grenade that can be turned into a healing mist by shooting it, the guy with an exo suit can slide and regain health by charging into enemies, and so on and so forth. There’s also weapon progression, which rewards you with attachments for sticking with your favorite gun.

Speaking of which, I can talk about characters and game modes until the cows call home but the most important part of any FPS is the gunplay and it’s definitely a highlight in Delta Squad. Each of the guns I tried handled differently and feels satisfying to shoot, and there’s plenty of feedback to know when hits land. The high level of detail involved with how the guns are designed, from damage drop-off to the clearly defined stats that actually matter, is another testament to the time and care the devs put into making the guns fun to shoot.

The amount of health is another important aspect that feels tuned just right. They managed to hit the delicate balance between being too tanky and made of glass, which is no easy feat. An engagement that goes on too long becomes tedious, getting taken out in two shots becomes frustrating, but landing in that sweet middle ground means you’re encouraged to think on your feet to find potential flanks without being outmaneuvered yourself.

Overall, Delta Force feels like a labor of love from a group of devs that wanted to take what they love about shooters and put the care and soul back into it. If you’re a fan of FPS games, then I’d definitely recommend putting this one on your watchlist.

Check out the game’s Steam page or website.

Disclaimer: This review is based off the build released for Steam Next Fest and is not based on a final product.

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