Wccftech was recently invited out to meet with the leads of Studio Jade to get an exclusive early look at the Black Hawk Down campaign set to become part of the complete Delta Force experience later this year. Alongside a small group of fellow media broken up into three-man squads, we had boots on the ground to get a first look at two of the Delta Force Black Hawk Down campaign’s early chapters.
The Black Hawk Down campaign is intended to be a much more masochistic take on the title’s tactical gunplay, and the developers intended for this co-op experience to require true cooperation to succeed. After picking one of the four pre-made operators, I had a limited selection of loadouts to choose from with no ability to customize and mix/match weapons and attachments. In the group Q&A following our session, I inquired if the Gunsmith system, which is a core part of the Delta Force multiplayer, would be considered to customize a pre-mission load out and was told by the developers that the amount of planning and procedure would run antithetical to the type of narrative they’re pushing in Black Hawk Down and the scramble of boots on the ground.
Because ammo and consumables are so scarce, bringing along an operator who can resupply fellow teammates is all but essential. While I initially thought that bringing a shotgun would work great for close-range encounters with its one-shot-ill potential, I instead started gravitating towards bringing along the heaviest machine gun I could manage with the highest ammo count. Headshots are almost always an instant kill in the multiplayer session I joined, so it made more sense to bring a weapon with the highest ammo count and carefully pick my shots to snipe enemies from out of their line of sight and hopefully make it through most of the stage without even needing to reload.
Gunfights are typically lethal for the side that comes in unprepared in Delta Force: Black Hawk Down. Most of my team’s early deaths were from not checking corners or opening a door only to find an enemy soldier with an assault rifle on the other side. While the enemies are incredibly deadly, I’m grateful that there are times when the AI is as dumb as a box of rocks. Sometimes, the enemies could have laser precision, while other times, I found they’d have their backs turned, allowing me a free shot before every other enemy within earshot would home in on my position and blast me away.
We only got a brief taste of two of the campaign missions to Delta Force’s Black Hawk Down campaign, but both had distinctly different gameplay loops. The first mission was a hostage rescue where, after being delivered to the roof of an abandoned apartment building, our squad had to proceed down to ground level, navigate through some open streets, and make it to a large multilevel building filled with enemy ambushes and hostages in dire need of rescue. Line of sight and vantage points played a major part in the latter section as enemies vastly outnumbered our modest squad, and any gunfights in the open would cause other enemies to swarm in. While I initially thought grenades would be an efficient way to take out groups of enemies hiding in rooms across the pavilion, I learned the hard way that one of these rooms held the hostages we were trying to rescue when we were met with a game over screen during our best run to date.
The other mission involved rescuing a Black Hawk helicopter that’d been, well, downed with enemy soldiers converging on its location. This was the first mission where we had an active time limit and had to play a bit more aggressively instead of moving from cover to cover. This was made increasingly difficult with the level being set up across scattered clusters of favelas with wide open streets that required constant awareness and changing the field of engagement from close quarters to long-range sniping at a constant shift. Our group took no less than three attempts to try and make our way toward the downed chopper and each time we were eliminated less than halfway from the goal, most often from a sniper hiding on one of the rooftops that we could never get a proper line of sight on to take out. I’m sure, with a bit more time to learn the layouts and anticipate these obstacles, clearing the campaign might get a little easier, but still not a walk in the park.
Delta Force’s Black Hawk Down is a drastic shift in both technology and pacing from the multiplayer experience that players might have to take a moment and recognize that they’re getting two distinct gameplay experiences in the same package. The last time I covered a multiplayer shooter that featured a distinctively different campaign was Remedy Games’ work on CrossFireX.It’s not to say that the two experiences are similar in every way, but rather the complexity of having to balance a modern-futuristic multiplayer experience with a campaign centered around Mogadishu in 1993.
TiMi Studio Group’s Team Jade will release the Delta Force Black Hawk Down campaign on February 21st.
[Editor’s Note: Travel and hotel accommodations were provided by the developers to attend this preview event.]
