[i]This review is only for the single-player "campaign" of this game. I haven't touched the multiplayer.
[b]TL;DR:[/b] A pretty big disappointment for an entry into the Delta Force franchise. Missions have no depth to them and the gameplay feels almost non-existent despite being made on the same engine as Land Warrior. Combined with QA issues and the lack of overall effort into the level design, it feels like cut-content for Land Warrior bundled together into a cheap cash-grab.[/i]
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As a player who prefers the older strategic/tactical vibe of the original Delta Force and Delta Force 2, I didn't particularly like the accessibility and switch to action-oriented gameplay in Land Warrior. So given the fact that Task Force Dagger is made on the same engine, it's natural to expect a similar level of accessibility to the title and I honestly wasn't looking forward to playing the game. Despite my low expectations of the title, it still managed to disappoint me heavily.
To start off, this game has no campaign. The "campaign" is literally a whole bunch of disjoint Quick Missions that don't start anywhere or lead anywhere. All the missions feel like generic one-shot scenarios that have little to no link to each other. The enemy in this case isn't even fleshed out and is just referred to as the enemy. The names of the Operations are as lazy as they get, being the literal names of the places where they take you. Likewise, there is no action plan involved in the briefing, which is no longer read out to you, and there is no map to help you plan your approach either. It's just an explanation of your objective, and even there, the actual objectives in-game differ greatly from what you're told in the briefings. While this can be construed as something closer to what actual Spec-Ops are told as they enter their missions, it only serves to make things less immersive for the players. At any rate, if this game has any trace of a story apart from accounts of random military operations around Afghanistan, I could not find any.
The game uses the same engine as Land Warrior and the overall gameplay is pretty similar to that title with the less cautiously tactical and more accessible action-oriented approach. However, the action sucks primarily because of the enemy AI which simply isn't programmed well. There are many levels with indoor segments but you won't know which ones they are until you begin the mission and given the disparity between the briefings and the actual levels themselves, you don't really know what you're in for until you actually play the missions. I have found myself confused to what it is that I'm actually doing in a few levels. Plainly put, the game is too simple and lacks the tension to be enjoyed as a tactical shooter and too short and slow to be enjoyed as an action shooter. The level design also plays a huge role in how unflattering the gameplay is.
The levels are typically short and end almost as soon as they begin. They don't go up in a blaze of glory as much as they start out weak and then fizzle out. There are very few enemies to deal with per level until the final few missions, making them very easy to begin with and the ones that are long are only long because they're padded out with pointless time spent travelling from one checkpoint to the other without anything else to do apart from negotiating the terrain if necessary. Even the Urban Warfare/CQB sections are pretty linear and open, lacking the tactical depth provided by Land Warrior. The level design is quite simply, lazy.
The AI is also a horrible mess in this game. A lot of them get stuck in random walls and fences while running and they take forever to react. In most cases, their shots are guaranteed to miss you and you can take your time taking them out. And they don't even aggressively flank or swarm you. They just stand in place and shoot or run about panicking, even when you're right in front of them. The only new thing introduced to the enemy AI is their ability to surrender where they drop their weapons and kneel, occasionally acting scared and begging for mercy. The friendly AI in this game, on the other hand, is a little too friendly, fancying the role of Switzerland and not taking part in the battle at all. They literally just stand where they were deployed, smiling at the enemies as they get gunned down. Perhaps they're all followers of Gandhi.
There have been new guns introduced to the game including balance-breaking weapon prototypes, but the game is just so simple that there's no point in using them most of the time and any weapon you pick gets the job done just as well. The variety of weapons in the game are so pointless that it doesn't even matter which class or faction you pick: of which, there are ten, but two of the same class, adding further to the pointlessness of the whole variety of choice scenario. A lot of other gear has also been removed and they now have a nice little animation of a plane flying overhead for laser-designated targets, but apart from that, its mostly pointless to bother with any of it.
The graphics are an admittedly strong point about this game as enemies are now visible without a scope and the terrain looks really beautiful, especially for a game from its time. The levels aren't nearly as greatly modelled and detailed as they were in Land Warrior and seem ramshackle and run-down in comparison, but it gets the job done nonetheless. However, as far as the audio is concerned, there is literally next to none, and even the sounds of the weapons feel off. There are some bare-bones dialogues every now and then, and they often repeat the briefing to you at the start of each mission. But that's about it. To further make a mess of things, they've added the sounds of gunfire and motor vehicles into the ambient noises for levels, confusing you every now and then.
But the worst offender of them all are the QA issues. Apart from the aforementioned disparity in the briefing and actual mission objectives, the briefing still has some very basic errors such as referring to HUMINT as HUMIT and recieving intel from Predator SIGINT instead of imagery. And that's the least of it. Without reiterating the aforementioned issues, some of the levels are just plain bugged. Operation Rhino Obj Nickel is a great example where you need to land right inside the enemy base for the compound has no gate through which you can enter the place. Then there are the worst offenders in Operation Harakat where you can often randomly fall out of your Helicopter in Part 1 and are practically on a timer in Part 2 where the assisting Helicopter invariably crashes into a building after a certain amount of time because it's floating too low in the sky. Operation Hadda Farm might just take the cake with its stealth infiltration requirements out of Assassin's Creed where you're supposed to tail a target into a buidling in broad daylight in a game not made for stealth. A few of the missions require foreknowledge and the others are simply too boring.
All in all, given the lack of a story, the dysfunctional AI, the level-design that feels like it was slapped together in a rush, the pointless diversity of choice, the overall lack of fun gameplay, and the whole plethora of Bugs and Quality Assurance Issues, I cannot find it in me recommend this game to anyone. Perhaps the only one it might suit is a hardcore, die-hard Delta Force fan, and that too, as something of an entry to complete their collection. For the rest, it feels too much like a bunch of Cut Content for Land Warrior slapped together in a new packaging and rebranded without so much as a secondary cursory glace into whether the title meets standards and everything is up to order for a cheap cash-grab attempt about fifteen years before it became the industry standard. Huh, Novalogic seems ahead of the curve in that aspect, it would seem.
