Delta Force’s large scale combat reminds me of Battlefield’s very best

I was the first to turn my nose up at Delta Force when it was announced. The freshly released (it’s in open beta but if everyone can click your game on Steam and play it, it’s released) multiplayer FPS is cavorting in the skin of the legendary 90s tactical shooter franchise of the same name. But listen up: It’s actually pretty good. In its best moments it channels Battlefield 3’s sense of fun and chaos.

I knew it before I even got my first kill. Of course, that was nearly 15 minutes of combat before I actually had to take someone down. I’m playing a medic, and while Napoleon Bonaparte might have said an army marches on its stomach—citation needed— this army marches forward only because I will it. My team is like ants, swarming towards the objectives with only me and my medic bag between them and a trip to the respawn point.

Delta Force is, really, two games right now. There will eventually be a third when the Black Hawk Down campaign launches next year but for now there’s the two multiplayer offerings: Warfare is a 32 v 32 combined arms throwdown across various objective modes. Then there’s Operations, which is an extraction shooter that’ll have you scuffling around for loot before you try to get to an extract, a lightweight version of Escape From Tarkov that I bounced off near immediately.

The element tying the two together are the operators. Delta Force is sort of a hero shooter. My beloved medic is called Stinger—real name Roy Smee. With a name like that I’d go by Stinger, too. There are eight ops right now: two each for the Assault, Support, Engineer and Recon classes. Classes determine which secondary gadgets you can choose from—support characters have the choice between an ammo bag or a medical bag, for example—but what will most define your playstyle is an operator’s passive ability, “ultimate” gadget and unique throwable.

In Warfare, these quirks just feels like a cool way to make you feel distinct. Stinger can revive people faster and has a tiny medic gun while recon specialist Hackclaw has a little flashbang drone and a tablet that can hack nearby enemy positions. But you also get these abilities in the extraction mode, and having a wrist mounted grenade launcher or the ability to fire off smoke dispensing drones at a moment’s notice feels overpowering, especially as you can’t actually loot these from your opponents. It just feels incredibly unfair to corner an opponent and have him fire a brace of grenades at you, especially as they recharge over time.

This isn’t the only reason Operations mode is—in my opinion— better off ignored, but personal preference could come into it more than anything else: Delta Force’s Operations mode is shallow, and has you looting containers and making a break for an extraction, chewing through other players and AI soldiers. Complexity is low, so you don’t have to faff around with magazines or grenades, instead just stuffing your pockets with medical supplies and bullets and get to work. Thing is, the joy of extraction shooters comes from the faff, so this was too shallow for me to get immersed in.

Warfare though? At its best moments, it channels the chaotic energy of Battlefield 3. Delta Force’s maps are meat grinder, pushing all 64 players towards a single pair of objectives in the Rush-like Attack and Defend mode or spreading out the fight in the Conquest-style King of the Hill.

Battle fields

So far, so Battlefield. But fight through the tunnels leading to the secret biolab at the heart of Shafted and it’s hard not to be reminded of pushing up the stairs of Operation Métro. Trench Lines has you fighting first to capture a military base then brawling through a series of trenches, a small town and then, finally, into a huge military compound with a giant tower in the middle. Fighting for control of the tower is essential, but more importantly, it’s a whole lot of fun.

On the face of it, Delta Force is aesthetically similar to Battlefield 2042, DICE’s latest. Battlefield 2042 has the stronger art direction, but otherwise I think Delta Force has it pipped in just how good the combat feels. Part of this is that vehicles and individual soldiers feel much less powerful than in Battlefield, so the pushes into enemy territory feel a little more furtive, with attacking waves hammering against a defensive line until you overrun the objective. Time-to-kill is low and the chance of getting a breakaway moment where you’re the hero feels so rare that when you actually do pull it off and flank the entire enemy team to pick off the enemy’s defensive position, it feels incredible.

Even behind the wheels of the vehicles you call in, 2042-style, by tapping the 5 key and dropping it on your location, you’re looking to support pushes rather than rocket around by yourself. A caveat here is that vehicles have unlocks and a loadout that upgrades after you spend time with them—I worry they’ll get more powerful as players get more comfortable with them and learn which combination of perks and quirks will make them more survivable. Right now through, destroying vehicles feels achievable as long as you’re not the only person toting a rocket launcher, and although main battletanks are terrifying killing machines, they’re so expensive it’s rare you’ll see more than one in a match and they’re such a magnet for any would-be vehicle hunters.

The weapon customisation is probably the deepest I’ve seen in a video game. You can switch out the stock, grip, barrel and just about everything else on most of the weapons in the game. Something I’ve never seen before is the ability for you to calibrate several of these attachments, too, tweaking the position of your sight or how the stock fits into your digital shoulder, slightly affecting weapon handling as well. I haven’t played with this too much yet, but it seems like a way for min-maxers to get everything they want from their weapon of choice.

Delta Force has a good foundation right now, but it has a bit of an identity crisis. I don’t care about these silly military men and their anonymous battlegrounds. It’s hard to give a game a sense of identity after launch, and I’d have my doubts about whether a hero shooter can be a hit if no one cares about the heroes themselves. Except, Delta Force already is a hit. Recently the game hit a player peak of 118,964 players. We’ll have to see how those player numbers look in a couple of weeks, but Delta Force is hot right now, and the best large-scale multiplayer shooter I’ve played in years.