I don’t know what I’m doing in Delta Force, but I’m having fun

A story of one solitary fighter and their crocodile friend made me fall in love with my first shooter in years

TiMi Studio Group / Level Infinite

I’m deep in the swampy surrounds of a large industrial dam when everything goes wrong. Camped out in the fronds, waiting for my opponent’s footsteps to get close enough to show the glint of a rifle in the distance, I ready my weapon and hold my breath, ready to pull the trigger. Just as the enemy crosses my sights, I notice a stray swamp crocodile in my peripheral vision — as an Australian, I know the dangers of crocodiles, but this one hadn’t noticed me, and it didn’t have a gun, so my priorities are on the more pressing dangers. 

With one swift pull of the trigger, the enemy in my sights falls, offering up a tantalising briefcase of goodies to pick up before extraction. But the friendly crocodile who had passed me by isn’t too keen on the sound of my gun, and before I know it, it’s nipping at my heels. It takes a healthy dose of bullets and some frantic jumping to take it down, but not before it sinks its teeth into my leg, wounding me greatly and leaving my chances of survival slim. 

Failure is not an option. I’d dropped into the dam with one of my best weapons, and picked up tens of thousands of dollars in loot while taking down enemies. Without a supply of bandages, there is little I can do to stop the bleeding, so wounded and hobbled, I make my way slowly, step-by-step, toward the extraction point a little over a mile away. It’s a difficult journey, with dozens of insurgents between me and my escape. With blood gushing out of my leg and no way to patch it up, I can’t run or jump, and I need to avoid as many clashes as I can, lest I run out of time. Health injectors had helped keep me alive up to this point, but I’m down to my last one. Half a mile to go. 

I drop onto my belly to take the weight off my foot, giving me precious extra seconds as I crawl to my final destination. After a gruelling half-hour, I finally arrive and signal to the chopper to take me home. As I wait for salvation, my vision blurs and the reaper whispers my name as enemies move in. I pick my shots, using my last few bullets to drop anyone who gets close, and with barely a spare drop of blood left in my body, my savior arrives and ferries me away from this damned dam. The reaper will have to wait.

TiMi Studio Group / Level Infinite

Delta Force doesn’t do anything particularly new. It’s a fairly run-of-the-mill shooter with a few different modes on offer, with everything from large-scale PVP matches with dozens a side facing off to capture points to small-scale PVE extraction missions. There’s nothing here that hasn’t been done before in games like Battlefield and Escape From Tarkov, but what is here is spectacularly polished to a mirror finish. 

For a game that’s still in development, everything in Delta Force feels very well-realised. The gunfeel is excellent, with fantastic visual and audio feedback, the sound design is phenomenal across the board, and the environments are varied and the topography makes for strategic advantages and disadvantages. I’ve never really thought much about the environments in a shooter like this, but Delta Force does such a great job with them that I couldn’t help but stop and pay attention. Of course, that usually resulted in getting immediately blasted from a well-placed sniper half a mile away, but that’s on me. Like I said, disadvantages — especially when you’re using a hill to admire the skyboxes instead of scouting ahead.

Performance-wise, even my humble gaming PC managed to run the game at a locked 60fps on Ultra settings, with not a single frame drop seen in even the most hectic of situations. The screen could be filled with smoke particle effects, a dozen players firing off rounds, and vehicles interacting with the environment, and my frame counter would still read 60 the entire time. And in terms of bugs, there was not a single creepy crawly to be found — as I said, this is very well polished across the board, from design to technical execution. 

TiMi Studio Group / Level Infinite

With that said, there are some small shortcomings. There is a tutorial, but it’s not particularly great at preparing you for everything there is. The basics are all there – running, shooting, looting, using abilities – but knowing what to do when you get into a real match is another story altogether. 

I was often thrown into large-scale PVP matches midway through and left to figure things out. And by figure things out, I mean wander around the battlefield somewhat aimlessly, taking potshots at enemies who are obscured by the game UI telling me I’m capturing a point. Also, dying a lot. 

Granted, some of this likely comes down to my own inexperience with shooters. It’s been a while since I last jumped into a Battlefield game, and I’ve never touched an extraction shooter, so a lot of this is largely foreign to me. It’s a testament to the game’s core design philosophies and well-executed gameplay that, despite rarely ever knowing what I was doing, I still had an absolute blast.

I don’t know if I’ll stick with Delta Force for long once it launches, but I can tell you at the very least I’ll be installing it on my SSD and jumping into a few games here and there when it does. I can’t say that about any other shooter in recent memory, and that’s an achievement in itself. When the game finally does launch, though, I think I’ll probably be a little more careful around crocodiles — or at least bring a bandage or two to patch myself up. I’ve also learned my lesson about hills.

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