Delta Force: Land Warrior Review

'You command the most advanced strike team ever assembled. Where there is terror, you bring retribution.... You are Delta Force...' Wow! What a pretentious sentence! I got goose-fleshed in the middle of it, and as I finished reading it I was ready to sign up with the army...

This is the third episode in the series of Novalogic's Delta Force games that begins with pompous announcements like this. And if you ask me, it's those announcements that sell 'em. When the first part appeared, it was immediately proclaimed to be THE best combat sim., even though there were some other notable contestants on the market at the time... The developers then developed the special 'voxel' engine, which was supposed to remain quite independent of other 3D engines and the amenities of modern 3D accelerator cards, which, they claimed, had been unable to make "the necessary graphic quality" possible... but, it sure didn't go that smooth. Reluctant to admit their "independent voxel engine" had been 'going nowhere', they added some support for 3D acceleration to the sequel, still leaving the main rendering job to the voxel thingy... that didn't make amends. DF games remained the only (older) games I never saw with a decent frame rate, regardless of the computer speed. That's why I eagerly waited for the Land Warrior, announced to be the first of the serial that would use full 3D...

So, finally I find DFLW in front of me, and I must admit it does look better. Land Warrior has a much higher frame rate with far better graphics. You won't have to face those ugly blocky and pixelated textures and terrain. The surrounding objects got some more polys and even the models seem to be better, which is more than could be said about their animation. As soon as I started the game I fell in love with the nice blurred textures of the trees and faraway objects. The trees look great with their semi-transparent textures, but if we consider how many trees there are around, we'd come to a conclusion this is another one of those post-apocalyptic games. The new engine was said to be much better at handling indoor situations, which it is, but that's still faaaaar from perfect. LW has a really hard time with that, and the frame rate doesn't get any better in confined spaces either, in spite of the relatively small number of objects present, and the obscure wall textures.

You won't see any grass for a change; I guess that was lost when they decided to make a proper poly-3D engine. That did feel a bit funny at first because I got somehow used to crawling through grass, or indeed being attacked suddenly by an enemy I did not see from the grass. On the other hand, that was one of the things that severely affected gameplay...

The greatest flaw of this engine that still keeps him from being a true full-3D engine is the weapons representation. Your lethal toys covering the bottom right of your screen are nothing more than ugly 2D sprites. Depending on the memory of your graphic card and the level of detail you selected, their quality will vary. These textures are completely still, and even when you change weapons, the computer simply changes the sprite with no animation (like in the first Deer Hunter ;).

Speaking of weapons, the game features H&K PSG-1 super rifle, FN MAG machine gun, AK-47 (finally), H&K G11 assault rifle, Steyr AUG with grenade launcher, Calico submachine gun, H&K UMP submachine gun, Glock 18, MM-1 grenade launcher and Pancor Jackhammer automatic shotgun.

The next big novelty is that you can choose one of five available characters instead of leading anonymous soldiers: two good chicks, two macho dudes, and one slightly effeminate dude. Something for everyone (Ouch, feisty comment - Ed)! Each of them has specific features and specialty (sniper, grenadier, CQB...). This idea of squad members being characters hasn't been implemented too good, though. They can die in one mission and resurrect in the next one... It seems as though all missions are a totally separate games, which have nothing to do with each other. This may be stupid, but it only gets worse...

AI...AI...AI....

I must admit I haven't seen so stupid computer opponents in a FPS game in quite some time. This is really tragic, almost as bad as the previous two Delta Forces... I wonder what's the point in watching a Rambo movie in which Slay gets to kill at least 80 soldiers and get a couple of blood stains, when you can play this game for about 20 minutes and kill just as much without actually getting any stains! The three levels of difficulty (stupidity) are slightly different, but I had no intention of trying what the Easy level looks like not even in the best of moods... A bunch of puppies and cooks with ladles would be worthy opponents compared to these losers...