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 change the story based on an event from the early ‘90s. Nor did I get any hands on time with it specifically, but he did mention that it is the team’s goal to make it a challenging and intense FPS experience where bullets are extremely lethal and being caught out of position could spell disaster.
I spent most of my time with Havoc Warfare, Hawk Ops’ take on Battlefield’s Breakthrough, where attackers must take points of interest from defenders, pushing their zones of control further and further back until they’re completely run off the map. The first big difference between Hawk Ops and games like it is in the loadout screen. I had the option between four different characters, each with a suite of special abilities, weapons, and tools that made them unique from one another – much like the Specialists in the Call of Duty series, but with three or four unique actions per character. I warmed up with Kai, who is mostly your standard assault gunner who can speed himself up temporarily, but also has a handy rocket barrage that’s great for clearing out tight spaces. I really got to sink my teeth into some more tactical options with Terry, who can use drones to scan for targets and immobilize them for a brief period, as well as set mines to trap enemies moving on objectives.
The map I played had some key fortified areas where using a little recon in advance of an assault really made the difference between taking an objective and getting stopped at the line. Unfortunately, I played in matches that were populated mostly by bots, and without pings or commands it was nearly impossible to coordinate these skills between players to make big gains, but the potential for comboing abilities for huge payoffs is written on the wall. Team Jade told me that other maps will test your squad’s tactical awareness even further as they’ll introduce mixes of indoor and outdoor objectives and verticality, as well as vehicles and weapon placements that can help teams get an edge or keep defenses solid.
Before you even choose your characters, though, you can fiddle with your loadout, or spend the in-game currency to buy some of the dozens of weapons and gear pieces available. Something remarkable about customizability in Hawk Ops is that not only do weapons have a ton of potential to add bits and bobs to them, all of which have some sort of consequence on gameplay, but each one of those pieces can be further customized, too. And not just colors, materials, or textures, but the actual size of pieces like barrels and cheek guards can be adjusted to make even more minute tweaks to weapons. I don’t think I have it in me to fine tune the lengths of all my favorite gun suppressors, but for those who are looking for an extra layer of optimization, Hawk Ops has what you need.
Dukes of Hazard
Item progression gets a little more complicated when you get to Hazard Operation, the extraction shooter portion of Hawk Ops. Weapons and mods can be bought from a greater marketplace (and can be meticulously modded as in other modes) but can be permanently lost if you’re downed while deployed. Yao smirked when I mentioned the prospect of a player losing a gun they spent an unreasonable amount of time preening over it in an abrupt hail of bullets. “The risk/reward elements of extraction shooters will be very present.” If you come across someone else’s precious weapon while in the field and don’t see the same value in it yourself, you can resell it on an open marketplace for in-game currency, a feature also present in games like Escape from Tarkov.
When you deploy into Hazard Operations, your goal is to scoop up anything valuable and take it back to base to sell. This could be other player’s prized weapons and armor, or rare treasures that only serve the singular purpose of being really valuable when resold, like a fancy futuristic VR console or some sort of super fancy high-tech medical equipment that I found on my journey. Clearly marked spots on the map highlight lockboxes that have a higher chance of containing something valuable, and are likely hotspots for enemy player activity.
Between these points of interest are various encampments, natural features like caves and cliffs, and old corporate buildings repurposed as fortifications for the many AI mobs that exist to put your life and your stuff in danger. These regular enemies will never be as significant a threat as other players, but they do at least keep the pressure on you to move with caution, as well as providing opportunities to earn basic equipment like ammo and health to keep you topped up on longer deployments. Not all of these NPC enemies are pushovers, though. Boss enemies with high health and rarer loadouts exist on the map to grant players added challenge in exchange for a higher chance of great loot. The one I found was draped head to toe with body armor and had several goons attacking my flank, but with a sound strategy heading up into its lair, I found a way to conquer it.
Though I could only try out one map, Yao and team assured me that multiple maps would be available to drop into at launch, each with their own layouts and points of interest. Something they really intrigued me was how character selection can affect your odds of survival. I was guided to choose the medical support character, as he had self-heals and a couple of reliable smoke deployment options to keep your movements hidden from dug-in threats. I can’t help but wonder how choosing someone like Luna with her Hawkeye-like trick arrows would fare in such an environment.
Delta Force: Hawk Ops might share a lineage with the old PC series of the same name, but it doesn’t share much of a resemblance. Its single player mode is revamped from the ground up with modern tech, old-school difficulty, and the blockbuster Black Hawk Down film as both reference and inspiration. Its two multiplayer offerings – a large scale objective based crawl and a dynamic extraction shooter – help highlight how Hawk Ops’ level design and characters put team composition and tactical decision making ahead of twitch shooting. Will all of its ambitions come together in a game that has the chops to steal you from your current forever game? Time will tell.
