Delta Force Review in Progress

ign.com:

“First-person shooter” is a broad term. It can mean everything from a monster-filled horror game like F.E.A.R., to a sci-fi adventure like Metroid Prime, to a demon-eviscerating romp like Doom. Even narrowing it down to a label like “military FPS” still puts the linear campaign of Call of Duty, the enormous PvP clashes of Battlefield, and the white knuckle extractions of Escape from Tarkov under a single umbrella. Delta Force, the latest entry in a now 26-year-old shooter series, is probably best defined as a bit of each of those last three – with a dedicated large-scale PvP mode, a separate extraction shooter mode, and an (as yet unreleased) campaign, it sits somewhat awkwardly at the center of a that Venn diagram. It is still too early to render a final verdict, but my initial hours playing ahead of launch have already left me intrigued enough that I’m looking forward to my next deployment on the live servers later this week.

Because this release is technically the start of an indefinite “open beta” (which, for a free-to-play game, really just means it’s out), only two of the three main modes are currently available, with the campaign planned as paid DLC somewhere down the line. Of the two that are here now, the Warfare mode is Delta Force’s answer to the big team combat of Battlefield. 64 players duke it out for supremacy across one of a handful of massive, sprawling arenas. The matches I played in the early review period were focused on the Attack and Defend option within Warfare, though King of the Hill and some other time-based modes are apparently going to be available at launch.

Attack and Defend puts one team on offense, tasked with capturing some strategic points before running out of a finite number of respawns, while the other team defends those areas with limitless lives. If the offense succeeds, they refill their respawns and the cycle begins anew on another part of the map until all of the field is seized or the defense stops them in their tracks.