Review by: Craig Miller
Published: November 16, 1998

I can remember a time not that long ago when I was a little kid and my friends and I would play “soldier” all day long. We would run and hide behind trees and buildings and lay in a ditch in order to not be seen. Even though there were lots of arguments about who was “dead” and who was not, we played until we couldn’t run anymore. As we grew older, stupidly enough we even tried using BB guns in our games. Obviously, that was a mistake and we found out soon enough after being stung a few times. For years, I have been looking for a similar experience that could be recreated on a PC. Many deathmatch games have come along, such as Quake and Unreal, and they are fun, but they don’t provide that feeling of being outdoors and having hills and trees to hide behind, let alone being able to see objects that are on the horizon. When I first heard about Delta Force I was very excited and for the most part, Novalogic has produced something of what I was looking for, even though they didn’t get it perfect.

Delta Force puts you in a special US Army force that is tasked to go to trouble spots all over the world to “solve” problems only the Army can solve, in a way that only the Army can. No, you don’t build a bridge; you pop a few caps in some bad guys. There are over 40 missions that you can be assigned, from South America to Southeast Asia and on to the frozen northlands of Russia. You can tackle these missions in either first-person of third-person perspectives. Due to the use of their Voxel Space technology, Novalogic lets the player interact in an environment that is miles in diameter. Unlike many games of this type you can see all the way to a real horizon and using a handy sniper rifle it is possible to pick off a target that is miles off in the distance.

There is a nice selection of weapons to use in the game including: the M19 pistol, M4 (modified M16 rifle) with the M203 grenade launcher, M249 Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW), M40 sniper rifle (.308 caliber), Barreta light .50 sniper rifle, Heckler and Koch MP5-SD (submachine gun), laser designator, satchel charges, and concussion grenades. Due to the nature of the game, it’s best to use a weapon that has a scope attached to it. The M249 (SAW) tears things into nice little bits, but it will do you no good if your enemy is half a mile away using a .50 sniper rifle. Probably the best weapon in the game is the M4 using a scope and putting it in burst-mode. The nice thing about the weapons is that there is no overpowering “must have” weapon that kills everything in sight.

Once you pick a character you are dropped off at your insertion point and told to go kick some butt. In order to help you along your way, there are a few computer controlled men that go along with you. They seem to mostly be for decoration and for background. You can’t give them any orders or devise some sort of clever strategy to take out the enemy like in Rainbow Six. Upon completion of the mission, you will end up with the most kills of your unit by far. Your fellow comrades are nice to have along, if only to provide other targets for the enemy to shoot at. The missions range from eliminating drug lords to rescuing hostages held in remote places. There isn’t really a focused storyline and you can’t improve your character in any way. In fact, the missions you go on seem to be disconnected and don’t give a sense of being part of a unit. If you are looking for any kind of character interaction or growth, forget about it.