The FPS campaign, out tomorrow, is all about the high stakes lethality of "real" warfare.
The main thing I remember about the movie Black Hawk Down, a thoroughly post-Saving Private Ryan slice of gritty military hero worship, is actor Tom Sizemore sauntering around with an almost casual indifference to the bullets whizzing past his head. Even when he gets hit, he treats it as more of an annoyance than anything. That’s an experience that plenty of first-person shooters mimic—letting you waltz through a wall of gunfire with preternatural calm, shrugging off a few rounds as minor flesh wounds—but it is not the experience of Delta Force’s new Black Hawk Down campaign, which will knock you down to a sliver of health anytime you pop out of cover for more than two carefree seconds. This is a shooter that treats bullets as deadly as they are to real human flesh. Pulling a Sizemore is a good way to end up real dead, real fast.
This campaign, a remake of one released 22 years ago, is a strange thing. Tightly scripted, with linear levels based roughly on the events of the film/book/game/real-life incident, Black Hawk Down has the lethality of a military sim with none of the complex simulation of an Arma 3 or Squad. It’s a game of cramped environments and methodical breach-and-clear moves from room-to-room, with slow animations and slower sprinting. I, too, would only be able to jog about 12 feet while carrying 100 pounds of gear before gasping for air, but I tend to prefer shooters that don’t fill my boots with lead.
The strangest thing about Black Hawk Down is how un-Delta Force it is. In our initial impressions of the multiplayer last year, we called it “a twitchy arcade shooter through and through,” more Call of Duty than Battlefield despite its large scale multiplayer maps. In the campaign, developer Team Jade has flipped that balance on its head, making stages that resemble Call of Duty’s most compact missions with pacing that’s comparatively ensconced in amber.
Weird as it is for these two experiences to be attached at the hip, Black Hawk Down’s slow pace and lethality accomplish what Team Jade is aiming for. The first mission I played, clearing out and then defending a single building in Mogadishu, was constantly tense. I had to carefully mind my ammo and ask one of the other two players in my squad, who was playing a support class, to keep me stocked; when either of us started bleeding out from a bullet to the knee, our medic could patch us up more effectively than we could ourselves. We almost immediately started calling out enemies and strategizing angles, because if we didn’t it was clear we wouldn’t last long.
I had fun being forced to play so carefully. Black Hawk Down is much less of a power fantasy shooter than Call of Duty, at least as long as you ignore the heroic framing of US soldiers shooting hundreds of interchangeable Somalians. Team Jade certainly did, insisting that a Chinese-made game about the American military’s involvement in an African civil war is entirely apolitical. Sure, man, whatever—expect nothing from your milsims and I suppose you’ll never be disappointed. But I was disappointed by what seemed a merely skin-deep difficulty, driven more by how little damage I could take than how clever or nuanced the combat was. Nothing I saw indicated sophisticated AI capable of flanking tactics or surprises, or levels open enough to approach from a variety of angles.
“We are trying to use this kind of [difficulty] to support the narrative—this is war you’re playing, it’s not a shooter gallery,” the developers said in an interview after my hands-on. But war is unpredictable and ever-changing in ways that Black Hawk Down doesn’t seem to be. A shooting gallery seems like a more apt comparison, even if the difficulty slider’s set all the way to max. This was highlighted in the last level I played, a classic turret sequence that put me behind a .50 cal on top of a humvee as we tried to evac the cramped streets of Mogadishu. This stage had the kinds of annoying insta-fail moments I remember from 2000s shooters—with none of the campaign’s lethality dialed down, incoming RPG fire seemed to spell almost certain death. We only played a couple minutes of that stage, but my first impression was that it’d take repeated tries to memorize every impending killshot.
The Black Hawk Down campaign is only seven missions, which Team Jade estimates will take 4-5 hours to finish. At that short a runtime, I think it’ll make for a good afternoon of co-op if you have some friends game to lock in. Otherwise, I think the multiplayer is the better way to spend your time—assuming it ever pares back its repulsive monetization.
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