Team Jade’s Delta Force: Hawk Ops revival was always planned to be an ambitious attempt at the modern military shooter in three distinct flavors: large scale tactical team-vs.-team multiplayer; Escape from Tarkov-inspired extraction shooter; and a focused, high-energy single-player campaign. The Warfare and Operations modes launched last year to mostly positive reception, but the single-player campaign – a remake of the original Black Hawk Down game inspired by the 1999 book that inspired the 2001 movie – was still in the oven cooking up a lot of intrigue. I finally got some hands-on time with a small selection of missions ahead of its launch, and while I can confidently say that it does genuinely capture the spirit of an old-school, turn-of-the-century shooter campaign, there are still enough unanswered questions that being guardedly optimistic is the only answer I could come up with after my time with it.
It’s going to be pretty tough for people who didn’t play the original game 20 years ago to compare it to Team Jade’s modern interpretation directly, since it’s not currently available digitally and physical copies of the old PC, PS2, and Xbox versions are becoming more and more scarce every year. But I was one of those people who was wading in the waves of the military shooter revolution at the time – the first Call of Duty launched the same year as Black Hawk Down, and Battlefield 1942 dropped the year prior. But I distinctly remember Black Hawk Down having some standout gameplay features that really raised the bar for the genre as a whole. It featured big, sprawling level maps that offer multiple ways to approach objectives. Some mission sequences would change dramatically depending on the current task, taking you from the back of a humvee to an on-foot stand-off with ambushers to a hurried escape via helicopter, all in the same chapter. And bullet physics and gun handling, specifically the more realistic projectile speeds, bullet drops, lethality, and recoil, made skirmishes less arcadey and more dangerous. Mixed with absolutely arid checkpointing, NovaLogic’s Black Hawk Down was one of the toughest games in the genre.
Team Jade’s Black Hawk Down certainly comes from a place of reverence for the old game, obvious in the way it tries to capture this old style of shooting in its missions, and also in the effusive praise game director Shadow and designer Novak laid on the other old work. “When we played the original in cafes so many years ago, it was mind-blowing,” said Joe Meng, PR Manager of Team Jade, translating on Shadow’s behalf.
Playing the initial mission, where we infiltrated the city in search of the enemy stronghold via a rooftop from a building nearby, the tense exchanges of fire between my squad of four (all played by other humans in co-op) and the enemies proved that keeping bullets dangerous was a top priority in their translation. It didn’t take much to drop us to dangerously low health, and that health did not restore itself after being out of combat for a bit. Only specific health restoratives could get us back to ship shape, and only medics – one of the four classes available to choose from – could provide them.
Once we got out to the street, progress became slightly less linear. This isn’t an open-world map, and there was a clear target that we had to infiltrate, but the path there felt open-ended. My squad, split into pairs, tiptoed down both sides of the street, following some NPC teammates in clearing buildings we passed on our way to the objective, in this case a hotel under control of rebels who were holding hostages somewhere in the building. We entered the building through the front, where the heaviest fire was being exchanged from the lobby plaza to our entrenched spot in the entrance. We could have found a side door and attempted to flank the lobby shooters as well, I found out later, and though you don’t have Hitman-levels of freedom, it is refreshing to know that if this Black Hawk Down has difficult chokepoints, the answer may lie in just finding a safer route. Shadow mentioned that the feeling of relief and reward for overcoming stacked odds was a driving sensation in the design, and this was a great example of it.
This mission was a little more linear than the next one we tried, which saw us sprinting through a claustrophobic shanty town attempting to get to the crashed Black Hawk helicopters. The mission’s pace and setting was very reminiscent of the original’s Valiant Heroes mission, which features a maze of buildings players had to navigate while freeing stranded friendly soldiers from incoming militia. Both used the labyrinth as an advantage for the enemies, who could pop out from around corners without warning, but where the original made you differentiate between hostile militia members and disgruntled civilians (penalizing you for harming the latter), this updated mission treated everyone in the branching alleyways or dusty markets that wasn’t you as an enemy.
Team Jade’s take does add snipers who can shoot at players from long distances from the relative safety of a clock tower several blocks away, uses modern environment design trends to make the city dense with small, open shacks and streets to navigate, and checkpoints that bottleneck the sprawling neighborhoods into points of entrenched resistance where more direct assault is required to continue. This was where the difficulty was its most intense, as enemies appeared from all directions, constantly moving while obscured by buildings and searching diligently for angles to take us by surprise.
I did miss the detail of having to show some semblance of trigger discipline under these conditions, though. It was certainly engaging and fun, but even in the face of the obvious danger, it felt like a step backwards from the kind of provocative design of the original. And in our limited test, we only tried out two of the seven total missions in the campaign, but neither gave the sense of dynamic scenario switching like the original’s River Raid, which starts as an on foot trek across the desert, turns into a frantic car chase through a minefield, then transforms into a Metal Gear Solid 3-esque tiptoe through the a Somalian river full of crocodiles, and then finally finishes with a multi-stage raid on a village. Of course this, or something equally as energetic, could be in the full three- to four-hour campaign, and I won’t discount the remake’s dedication to the original’s boldness of mission design before deploying myself when it launches on February 21st.
