Delta Force: Task Force Dagger

This has got to be one of those times when I wish that Steam had a third or maybe a fourth option when recommending or not recommending a game because in this case while I gave it a thumbs up that doesn’t necessarily mean I would recommend it. I first played this game back in the very late 90s early 2000’s, I enjoyed it then and I’m still enjoying it now despite its glaring flaws and obvious low budget for even for when it was created. GRAPHICS: Bad even for the time when it was developed, the graphics were bad then and they are still bad today. However, stellar graphics is not the end-all to beat all and I am a firm believer that gameplay goes farther than graphics quality though I have to admit I wouldn’t mind a re-master of this and the other games in the Delta force franchise by nova logic. Characters are very polygonal as was common back then, there is no animation for weaponry load or anything like that it’s all very rudimentary enemies have only the most rudimentary movements and weapons and other objects in the game feel like paper cutouts rather than three-dimensional objects AI: the artificial intelligence for both enemy and allied characters (on the few occasions you have them) was poor even by the standards of the time and over 20 years later I feel that it shows even more. Enemies unless they are carrying a sniper rifle will often be slow to react to you and will instead often times just stand there like paper cutouts or targets on a shooting range leaving you with the feeling that you are in fact shooting at glorified pop-up targets rather than enemy bots. The enemies are definitely a whole lot of miss and very little hit, if you are on a mission where there is an underground portion of the level expect that enemies will detect you above ground and will start shooting at you but thankfully not be able to hurt you which really destroys the immersion plus enemy animation, such as it is seems to be limited to four only: running, kneeling (and which again they look like paper cutouts) overly dramatic death animation and of course shooting at you. Even on the highest difficulty the enemies in this game are not what I would call challenging 90% of the time, enemies can be killed usually with one or two shots and while they can be ridiculously accurate at distance if and only if it seems they have a sniper rifle the rest of the time they’re more close to being clay pigeons. GAMEPLAY: gameplay for this particular entry into the franchise I find to be oddly enjoyable, yes there is a certain amount of repetitiveness to it but generally you are not doing the same thing mission after mission it does vary it a little bit but generally missions consist of gathering Intel, destroying specific targets, clearing out bunkers, one ambush mission and one refreshingly not annoying escort mission. Missions can be short and to the point or they can be longer, you do have a sort of in game map in the form of a command screen which allows you to see a tactical map which is populated for you by a UAV drone which you do have some limited control over however if you are in a mission that has you going underground you will be going in completely blind because there is no in game map to show you the layout of the bunker anything so expect to spend some time wandering around. Waypoints in this game can be kind of clunky, fortunately you have the ability to cycle through them at will using the F5 key which you will have to do on some occasions because one of the fascinating things about the way this game is designed is each mission has an extremely large map that will allow you to go pretty much anywhere and you are not required to complete most mission objectives in a linear order though this can throw a monkeywrench into the game so bear that in mind. You have the ability to save at any point in the game with one of three save slots which act as save state which you can load at any time, or leave the mission entirely and restart from that particular point in the mission with a different player and different weapon loadout and full ammunition. OVERALL: this game is obviously not going to appeal to everyone, I already stated that I enjoyed playing it back in the day and I still enjoy it now but I am not oblivious to its glaring flaws and how poorly it stacks up to more recent tactical shooters. While some of the complaints I’ve mentioned are also true of the previous games in the franchise including land warrior, I have still found this game and land warrior to be enjoyable. Whether or not anyone enjoys this game is going to be completely up to them and what kind of expectation that they have going into it, at least that’s what I think.