If you want to switch from a sniper rifle to a submachinegun, or if you've run out of anti-tank rockets, all you have to do is drop a grenade at your feet and you'll soon be back in business. This makes the game a bit easy and even rewards suicidal play. If you die, then you'll start over again at the most recently passed checkpoint but any enemies you happened to kill since then are still dead. There are some exceptions, like the very first and very last missions in the campaign, where you really feel like part of a team, but otherwise it's mostly a solo effort. In fact, most of the time they'll just be standing around waiting for you to hit the next checkpoint. You're given a few squadmates to help you out, but this isn't like Call of Duty or Brothers in Arms where they actually show much initiative or are scripted to engage the enemy intelligently. The mission with the bridge blockade was particularly obnoxious. We've even passed by some ambiguous triggers and, instead of being rewarded for our resourcefulness and ingenuity, were instead forced to restart the mission and play it the way the designer intended it to be played. The mission triggers are also a bit confusing and more than once we found ourselves with all the objectives accomplished and no clear reason why the mission wasn't ending. The change in settings from jungle to snow to desert attempts to hide the monotony of the missions but it just comes across as confusing, even to the enemy soldiers who aren't always dressed appropriately for the changing environments. I say "try" because the overall context is provided solely by pre-mission briefings, which can be ignored as long as you understand that your goal in each mission is to kill everyone you see and to blow up anything that hasn't already exploded. They try to tell a story of a terrorist drug lord named Desert Rat. The single player portion of the game consists of two five-mission campaigns that you can finish in a day or two. However all of these things become nothing more than candles guttering out at the bottom of a deep, dark cave when placed into the greater context of NPCs and vehicles getting stuck, helicopter crews inexplicably skydiving at the start of missions, and a general lack of polish that makes me wonder if NovaLogic even care about the games they make any more.Delta Force is back and just the same as it ever was. There's a decent selection of weapons and vehicles, a co-op mode for the multiplayer, and the occasional mission featuring a 'jump from the helicopter' deployment. Weighing it up fairly and without a burning hatred for those who took away our beloved voxels, there are a few pleasing features, of course. Whatever the cause, this void is noticeable and all that remains is a thin, bitter shell of stilted gameplay, poor visuals, simple AI, a single-player mode that now feels rather aimless, and a multiplayer that very few people seem to be bothering with. Perhaps when NovaLogic decided to tear the voxels from the Delta Force franchise, its soul was torn away with them.
The lack of voxels is perhaps to blame for this husk of a game.
Besides, voxel sounds better than pixel, like it was dreamt up by a SHODAN-esque supercomputer in a lab somewhere. And of course, those cute little volumetric pixels were useful back then for rendering long, dense grass. It was like walking through a world made of LEGO bricks. People derided novalogic for their quaint insistence on using voxel-based engines back in the day, but I always thought the end result was rather cosy and cute.
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