Hawk Ops’ Is A First-Person Shooter With An Identity Crisis

Call of Duty and Battlefield look out: There’s a new game in town. Delta Force: Hawk Ops is a free-to-play military FPS and we just got our first look at it during Gamescom’s Opening Night Live presentation. Here’s what we know so far.

The original Delta Force came out way back in 1998 (you can still play it on Steam) and the final game in the series—Delta Force Xtreme 2—came out eleven years later (and is also on Steam, with mixed reviews).

The series fell by the wayside, eclipsed by more popular and better made games like Call Of Duty and Battlefield, both of which had already begun to grow into the behemoths they are today. Fast forward to 2023 and the original developer and publisher of the series, NovaLogic, is no more. THQ Nordic purchased the studio’s assets and somewhere along the way, the Delta Force IP made its way to Chinese megacorporation Tencent where it is now in development at TiMi.

TiMi is the largest video game developer in the world in terms of revenue, having developed some of the most popular titles in the history of video games, mostly for mobile. These include Honor Of Kings, Arena of Valor and Call Of Duty: Mobile among many others.

That last one is what makes the studio a solid pick for Delta Force: Hawk Ops, the rebooted entry in the long-dormant Delta Force first-person shooter series. In the trailer below you can see glimpses of the single-player campaign, which appears to be Black Hawk Down, and some multiplayer gameplay:

“Delta Force: Hawk Ops is a brand new cross-platform tactical shooter where you’ll play the role of an Operator tasked with accomplishing extreme missions through precise tactical planning and application,” the video description reads.

Alongside the campaign the game will feature two multiplayer modes: “Hazard Operations” and “Havoc Warfare”. The first is an extraction mode a la Escape From Tarkov and Warzone’s DMZ mode. The second is large-scale PvP.

In terms of graphics and gunplay, I mostly like what I see here, though the large-scale battles will appeal more to Battlefield players than to Call Of Duty players like me. I prefer small team battles, but if this plays well I’ll give it a chance. The gunplay looks snappy and responsive, though it’s impossible to say how it feels until I take it for a spin.

Now For The Problems

First of all, I’m not at all thrilled that they’ve taken this into the future instead of tapping into the series nostalgia and going back to the 90s’ and early 2000s’. That’s not the end of the world, but it is disappointing.

I am far, far more concerned with the fact that they have “unique Operators” who appear to have goofy powers like speed boosts and bows that can reveal enemy locations. I hated these kind of powers when they were introduced to Call Of Duty and I suspect I will hate them here as well. When you play a military shooter, you play for the guns and vehicles and aesthetic—not for stupid hero powers.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy hero shooters like Overwatch and Valorant, but I don’t want hero shooter mechanics mixed in with my military shooters.

I believe Tencent has wildly misread the demand here also, as I suspect a straight-up military shooter is exactly what a lot of people are hoping for right now in a market that is already packed with hero shooters, and with much grumbling about Call Of Duty and Battlefield.

One of the biggest turn-offs I have to Ubisoft’s upcoming free-to-play shooter XDefiant is the inclusion of special abilities, many of which I did not like at all during the beta. Whatever that game has going for it, it’s going to squander trying to be watered-down hero shooter.

I’m still stunned, honestly, that people are so excited for XDefiant given that its basic promise—to give us an alternative to Call Of Duty—is broken immediately by these wildly unbalanced powers (not to mention that it’s Ubisoft we’re talking about).

In any case, my enthusiasm for Delta Force was pretty high when I first heard about it, but these stupid powers have pretty much killed it for me. If I want to play a hero shooter, I already have Overwatch, Valorant and plenty of others to choose from. If I want to play a military shooter, I have Call Of Duty, Counter-Strike, Battlefield and so forth.

Delta Force: Hawk Ops looks like a game with an identity crisis, uncertain of what market and audience it should appeal to, risking appealing to none in the process. That’s the problem you get when you try to be everything to everybody.

What do you think? Let me know on Twitter or Facebook.