As if we were in any doubt of this, we played through a couple of the game's 20 missions with Novalogic producer Ed Gwynn, who was keen to impress upon us the amount of variety and complexity we can expect come October. The upshot of all this is that while Black Hawk Down is still very much a Delta Force game at heart, it's a far more complete and accomplished example than any before it. How the addition of vehicles will figure into multiplayer is yet to be seen, but it certainly suggests some interesting possibilities (humvees vs technicals, anyone?). These are set to include attack choppers, humvees and maybe more, though as no vehicles had been implemented last time we played the game, it's hard to see the developers expanding much on this list (it's due to ship in October). And you better believe the team is working on some serious multiplayer options, with co-operative play, team deathmatch and free-for-all modes already confirmed.īetter still, the engine's chopper-sim background is set to produce some top-notch vehicular action, with both airborne and ground vehicles available through the course of the 20 missions. Most striking of all, the levels are simply huge, promising to take the trademark multiplayer action to even greater heights. It's a far cry from the drab days of Land Warrior, that's for sure.
Characters move convincingly around the terrain, and scripted and real-time events mesh seamlessly to create the illusion of battlefield chaos.
The environments are expansive and detailed, the action transitioning smoothly between indoor and outdoor settings. It's being built on a modified Comanche 4 engine, which has adapted remarkably well to powering a first/third-person shooter. In fact, they often looked nasty, and were saved only by their addictive multiplayer modes, working hand in hand with the excellent NovaWorid Internet servers.īlack Hawk Down, on the other hand, the first significant Delta Force game since Land Warrior, is a visually striking piece of software. While previous Delta Force games, much like the films of Chuck Norris, have always had something to recommend them, they were never exactly works of art. More importantly, it all looks rather good. Instead, the game takes the far more sensible route of recreating, as closely as possible, the events that took place in Somalia circa 1993, content with only visual reference to the film. Neither is it, as we had originally hoped, the long-awaited collaboration between hairy-chinned action has-been Chuck 'The Ginger Ninja' Norris and homegrown cinematic visionary Ridley Scott, in which Chuck returns to Somalia to rescue captured American GIs from illegal POW camps. And needless to say, it's not going to be any summer holiday.Ĭonfusingly, Delta Force: Black Hawk Down is not based on the film or the book of almost the same name, or even the incident in which the Black Hawk went down (see boxout: Massacre in Mogadishu). This time we're off to Mogadishu, Somalia, with our good friends the Delta Force, the eponymous heroes of Novalogic's long-running tactical action series.
We still get to shoot things in the head, but the change of scenery is always nice. Of course all this is fine news for us gamers, as there's only so many ways you can kill a roomful of Nazis. Behind Enemy Lines hitting the cinema screens when the dust had barely settled in Kosova -it's getting to the stage where US presidents have to start wars just to appease the appetite for new consumer products (and don't be surprised when the Operation Enduring Freedom RTS comes along in a year or two either). Delta Force: Task Force Dagger's Afghan setting. Now that all the big wars have pretty much been covered though, the demand for new conflicts is effectively outstripping the supply, and we seem to be getting the film and the game of the war before the fighting stops. Nothing too close to home, mind, but give them a real-life conflict in a far flung nation and they're as happy as a dog with two dicks. They want violence and war, rivers of blood and viscera, and they want it in a form they can identify with.
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