grimjack2's Full Review: Delta Force: Land Warrior
Delta Force Land Warrior is the best choice for a 1st person shooter for people who really love to play sniper.
This is the first game from the makers of the very popular Comanche and Armored Fist games to switch from using their voxel engine to today’s more common 3d accelerated engine. Voxel is the name the engine’s creator used to describe ‘volume pixels’. Basically this engine works with pixels that have height. I still remember playing Comanche back in 1993 with my 486x66 and being absolutely amazed. It was easily the best ‘virtual reality’ engine ever, until Doom came out several months later. However, the problem with a voxel engine is that it cannot be accelerated by any conventional 3d graphics card, and thus is very processor intensive. I played this game just fine on a P3-500 with a Hercules Geforce 2 MX.
The first two Delta Force games were very good in their own right, and were sniper’s paradises as well. Something that the Quake, Unreal and Lithtech engines never have done very well is handle large open areas with lots of variations in height. Those games work best in an environment mainly consisting of corridors and buildings. Even the better maps tend to have flat terrain, and lots of unclimbable valley walls. Nova Logic saw where technology was going and made this game using their own new 3d engine, but still found a way to have the huge terrains their games are famous for.
I want to emphasize just how large these maps are. I played one map where you sort of go in a U-shaped wide valley between three drug labs. After dying and having to start over again, I climbed up the valley wall, between the U, and from that height could see what is possibly a mile in the distance. Using both my sniper scope and binoculars, I could clearly see enemies moving around and structures I knew were there. The game environment is huge, and there don’t seem to be any Half-life type tricks where sections of the map are loaded and unloaded as you move around.
Let me start with what I like about the game first. Most missions start with you being dropped off in some sort of vehicle. I’ve started a mission by being flown in by a helicopter, boated in by a Zodiac, and even parachuted a few times. These are actually cool modes of transportation that are completely 3d, and not just a video clip or something. While coming up to an oil platform in the dark using the Zodiac a second time, with my sniper scope I picked off a bad guy or two from a great distance. While falling in the parachute you can actually turn a little, and control your decent, which really isn’t a good idea objective-wise, but it shows a kind of detail with the engine that I like to see.
A very exciting level begins with you in a helicopter circling an abandoned prison now overrun by terrorists and you are trying to pick off more than a dozen guys out of the towers and rooftops. Since most of the sniping in the game involves you and your opponents fairly stationary, this felt quite different and was very fun.
Like I said before, this game is truly a sniper lover’s paradise. You have all sorts of weapons in the game, but almost all the missions will require you to stick with your multi-purpose OICW with a sniper scope. The way the scope works is a really great concept. It doesn’t fill or replace your view like Unreal Tournament, but instead is a large circle in the lower right of the screen that is an enlarged representation of what the crosshairs in the center of the screen is aimed at.
There are a few levels of zoom, but unlike Hitman, there really isn’t any drawback to sticking with the largest zoom mode. There isn’t any sort of bobbing faction (if you choose the sniper as your character), and the bullet will travel a bit at great distances, but at normal difficulty your bullet will hit dead center every time. If your scope is on, as soon as you start moving, it disappears but automatically comes back as soon as you stop. This is very convenient when crawling a little forward for a better angle.
However, as good as this all sounds, something about a game that relies so much on the sniping ends up being a little unsatisfying. One problem is that there doesn’t appear to be any sort of body damage. Hitting someone in the hand is just as deadly as hitting them in the head. When sniping, this means I can be looking at someone so far away that he is only a few pixels, pull the trigger and he drops without any problem. This is a little disappointing considering how much better some newer games handle the same thing.
Another weakness with a game that primarily revolves around sniping is that it just isn’t as tense as rounding the corners of a fortress never knowing who is going to be firing at you next. When I got a chance to snipe in games like Half-life, Sin or Jedi Knight, it was great because it didn’t happen too often, and usually gave you a huge advantage when done right.
There are a number of other weapons you get to use in the game. You have a knife, but you can’t throw it, and I’ve only risked using it to see if it works. A pistol that works great, almost too great. It has an accuracy that is better than some of the automatic weapons. There isn’t much reason to use it, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the beta testers never tried it. Then your OICW which has three modes: Semi-automatic, burst (3 shots), or a grenade launcher. The Grenades work well, and the arc obeys the laws of physics. A standard M16 which instead of the grenade mode, has a fully automatic mode.
These are just the primary weapons, and there are equivalents that can be used if the mission requires it. Instead of the OICW you can choose a more powerful .50 caliber semi-automatic sniper rifle that has a scope of x14! Instead of the M16, you can choose similar weapons that may hit harder, hold more rounds, or have a silencer. Most of the time you can stick to the standard weapons and do just fine. The only time I had to use the suggested weapons was when I need an explosive pack instead of grenades.
You can run and shoot the rifles, but the crosshairs expand to show a loss of accuracy until you stop. Very nice, but in truth, you still tend to hit the targets so you don’t need to worry about stopping when fighting close quarters. You also have fragmentation grenades, and a rocket launcher. This isn’t a rocket launcher like Quake, but more like the one in Half-life, complete with smoke trail and very limited ammo. You also get a laser designator which lets you lock onto targets and call in an air strike. This actually works worse than it did in Nova Logic’s Comanche and Armored Fist games. You don’t see any plane or group of artillery drop down. Instead after about sixty seconds there is just a large explosion where you pointed your target at. What is really bad about this is the fact that unlike in real life the bombs aren’t guided to wherever you are pointing the target, but instead it is like a fire and forget system. I find it very strange why they designed it that way, when they’ve done better in their earlier games.
All these weapons have multiple enemy equivalents. In at least one mission I was able to go into an enemy bunker and switch them, but there wasn’t much of a reason to. You can also take over large caliber weapons that are permanently placed. These work well, and are fun, but tend to have a limited turn range, so by the time you get to control one, you’ve probably killed all the men nearby.
The interface also includes a constant 2d satellite map in the lower left showing where your nearby enemies are and which direction they are facing. However if they are above or below you, you can’t tell this from the radar, often confusing me in levels with underground tunnels. I also have a complaint with the way that the radar works. I’m used to games where the map turns with me, unlike here. I instinctively keep wanting to turn until enemies are at the top of the map. Perhaps I’m being picky, but it is just what I’m used to.
The game’s graphics are very good in some ways, and behind the times in others. Many of the structures in the mission look good. The Japanese Pagoda and the Pyramids looked excellent. Looking through my binoculars at a bird flying overhead and following it until he passed in front of the sun, literally blinding me for a moment was great. (Although I should mention that the birds all seem to be Vultures, and are even flying around in the night missions). The sky looks great everywhere, with clouds subtlety moving. The ground looks okay, and is always slightly hilly which is of course great for snipers. However, the color scheme is what seems weird with it. All the colors are slightly muted, and without a large color palette often making it hard to see some of the ground’s variations at a distance. The desert looked great in the beginning, but later in the grassy missions, it still kind of looked like desert to me. A few missions have water, and there is an excellent reflection effect with it.
The enemy graphics look good until you get up close. Their movement is okay, but after a few missions you’ve seen all their movements. Shooting an enemy often gives you a satisfying burst of blood that lets you know you’ve scored a direct hit. Some enemies when under fire will drop to the ground. Lying prone like this, they are difficult to tell from those you’ve already shot and are lying dead.
There are a few night missions where you need to look through a green cat’s eye. You have a limited circle in which to see, even smaller if your scope is on. Having to turn it on and off as you enter lighted areas adds to an already tense mission.
The Sound in the game is very good as far as the weapons go, and walking on different surfaces. Each weapon seems to have a different sound, and one of the tensest things in the game is listening to a bullet whiz past you, or hit the ground in a little plume of dirt near you, and you have to immediately drop to the ground, and start scanning the terrain for the sniper drawing a bead on you. Unfortunately there is no 3d-surround sound, which I’ve grown quite accustomed to in other games.
When playing single player, there are 10 quickstart missions, and a campaign consisting of 19 linked missions. After you’ve finished a campaign’s mission it appears on the list of quickstart missions for you to play again. The three difficulties only seem to make a difference in the number of enemies, unfortunately.
One of my bigger complaints with the game is the computer’s AI. The enemies tend to notice a fallen comrade, but can seldom tell where your shots are coming from if you are far enough away. Sometimes they try to make themselves a smaller target, but usually not. Some enemies will try to out flank you, or hide in ambush, but these seem limited to scripted events rather than true AI.
Another problem with the enemies is that they actually give you a few moments to shoot them when you round a corner and see them pointing a gun directly at you. Their responses are so poor that I often feel comfortable just running around with my gun on automatic shooting them as I see them.
Some missions will give you AI controlled teammates. Sometimes these guys are a help, but you really won’t miss them much once they’ve gotten themselves killed. They are more intelligent than the Comanche wingman who were ludicrously more dangerous to yourself, and always out of control when attacking the enemies.
Another thing I am amazed that happens occasionally in the game is that my commander will radio in something like “Good job. The area is clear. Now move on to the next waypoint.”, and as soon as I start to run through the area, one or two enemies will open fire. The same thing has happened at the end of my games too. I don’t know if I’ve ever played a game before where I cannot trust the computer when it tells me that I have accomplished my goal.
Another unsatisfying thing about the missions are how they end. You usually get a simple message of congratulations and then a box saying to press return to finish the mission or space to restart it. There is no debriefing or statistics on how many kills you made, how accurate your shots were, or any record of how well you performed. Any of these would have been nice.
Some missions are long, but you are given three saved game slots to save anywhere in the middle of a level. When you die, the game intelligently gives you the option to load from it.
I haven’t even really touched upon the multiplayer capabilities, and since I’ve played the game so late after release there isn’t a huge number of people still playing it. There are many ways to play, most of which we’ve seen before, like capture the flag and king of the hill. The different types of soldiers may make more of a difference, but I wouldn’t be surprised if most people just play sniper from a distance. A Search & Destroy game has your team of people trying to blow up something in another team’s area. There is also an Attack & Defend game that seems to be a less interactive form of my favorite Unreal Tournament game, Assault.
And there is a mission editor, but I couldn’t find any interesting custom made maps to try and see if anyone out there could design an even more entertaining single player mission.
For all its flaws, I do want to say that I enjoyed myself playing this game. If you are the kind of person that gets a warm feeling inside when from 500 yards away you line up your crosshairs just right, and kill two guards standing next to each other with one bullet, then you’ll probably enjoy yourself playing this too.
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