Delta Force: Hawk Ops Aims to Be 3 Tactical Military Shooters in One
There was a lot that came out of my hands-on time with Delta Force: Hawk Ops that I didn’t expect. I didn’t know it was a top-to-bottom reboot of the 1999 series of military shooters, re-imagined meticulously in Unreal Engine 5. I would have never guessed it was attempting to strike out at not one, not two, but three different current shooter sub-genres all at once. And I would have never imagined that my short time with it would leave me anxious to play more of its heavy tactics-focused running and gunning.
Developer Team Jade’s Head of Studio Leo Yao answered my most obvious question first: “How did a Chinese studio get their hands on such an American franchise?” Long story short, THQ Nordic acquired the assets from the original developer NovaLogic back in 2016, and it was lost in the Embracer Group slurry until it was rescued by Tencent a few years ago. “I’ve always had a soft spot for the series,” Yao told me, adding that outside of personal attachment, the team saw a lot of potential in reviving the franchise in 2024. They aren’t simply redoing the original game with shiny new coat of paint, either. They’re expanding it into a massive game with three distinct experiences: a large-scale, team-based PvP mode; an extraction shooter a la DMZ or The Cycle; and a single-player campaign with hopes of recapturing the magic of military shooters of yesteryear.
A lot of that potential is in the series’ 2003 adaptation of the book Black Hawk Down, about the Battle of Mogadishu. Yao told me that as the most recognizable entry in the series, it served as the perfect point of re-entry, and the best place to start the re-imagining process. The first big change being that this version of the single-player campaign will be based on the Ridley Scott film of the same name, complete with the rights to footage. He wouldn’t give me details on how any of this would integrate into the campaign, or the fact that the rest of the game’s near future tech and aesthetics would potentially
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