Delta Force Land Warrior - When a step forward is a step back (PC Game Review / First Impressions)

When most people play the first two Delta Force (DF) titles, they usually notice the obvious: suddenly, their shinning graphics card, costing nearly half the price of the whole PC, seems to be doing nothing, not helping accelerating the game's graphics.

But there is nothing wrong with their graphics card, nor with the DF software. What happens is that the first DF titles were coded NOT using instructions that could profit from the available acceleration. 3D graphics acceleration - just like any other hardware acceleration - is something that, from a programmer's point of view, begins at the hardware driver level: the drivers should be written in such a fashion, that they will bridge some function calls to some in-chip capabilities, taking the burden out of the CPU's shoulders.

But why weren't the first DF titles written to exploit the available hardware acceleration? Answer: because the available hardware was (is) absolutely oriented towards triangles... In some cases, it is not relevant if your graphics card is an old Matrox Mystique or a recent NVidia Quadro Pro, because the main difference between the successive generations of gadgets, is their triangle pumping power.

In Delta Force and Delta Force 2 the environments aren't claustrophobic. Forget Quake's small rooms, narrow corridors, and non-existent exteriors, and experience natural spaces, wide open, stretching to where the eyes can't see... and, eventually, to where the CPU can't handle :).

Yes, that was (notice the past tense) the DF way, and in order to achieve it, Novalogic invested on a Voxels engine, ie, they ran away from polygons and built worlds on a different technology, more appropriate for wide open areas, based on the concept of "volume pixels" - voxels.

Some algorithms on voxels can be less intensive; for example, sceneries tend to be drawn from front to back, and that allows the programmer NOT to draw what is not going to be seen (because it will be going to get covered by some objects) instead of facing the problem of the removal of hidden surfaces.

Polygons can be used to do whatever you need, but they simply get to be too many, for the level of detail wide open areas demand. Even the fastest card on the world, won't be able to sustain an acceptable frame rate, if you ask it to render millions of millions of millions of triangles, and then texture them, and then rotate them, and then do some scaling... you (do not) get the picture... :).

So voxels it was, for the sake of wide open areas. And wide open areas are just so great, in a world crammed with (just) interiors. DF and DF2 are unique titles, allowing you to go OUTSIDE, like Outcast... What I am trying to write, is that Novalogic was delivering fresh and alternative software. If you wanted small narrows spaces, great for first person shooters (FPS), you had Unreal and so on... if you wanted freedom, you had DF...

Delta Force Land Warrior (DFLW) kills the alternative. I am going to be hard on my first approach to DFLW. Until now, I've only completed the first campaign @ Egypt, and what I've seen distresses me...

DFLW is a mix of open spaces with FPS architectures. In previous DF titles, there simply were no interiors; now you have insides with the detail that you can find in ID's original Quake - is this a progress? In technical terms, yes; for the player, NO!

DFLW's new detail comes because of polygons, so - finally! - your 3D accelerator will make a difference. However, overall, the series lost its appeal, bringing in no alternative and losing where it really, once, made a difference.

Years ago, I remember reading someone's post on the Usenet, saying "Delta Force had the worst graphics he'd ever seen". It is because of monkeys like this dude that the gaming community now lost one of its most superb efforts on a different technology. Shame on you!

DFLW plays very much like the previous DF titles: you choose a soldier, you equip him / her with appropriate weapons, then you get to action. Action comes in two flavors: close range and long sniper range. I used to prefer the "sniper" way, but that is something that also changed...

The new DF screen, shows the weapon's ocular too much to the right of what you are really pointing at, making it a bit confusing, at first, to sync the main screen with the small zoom window. In other words, the old main view, organized in slots, showing weapon selection, ammo availability, and sat geo data, is gone, replaced for a... - you guessed it - more FPS'ish representation... where icons of your status do the job. And the job is well done, except for the sniper guns, which were my favorite... Damn!

Egypt... You have the pyramids, lots of sand, and the big cat-like Sphinx. For moments, the beautiful sky and the vast wide desert, fool you into thinking that DFLW is, again, king of the voxels, with trickery to profit from 3D acceleration... but then, as the mission happens, you realize that everything is set to get you INSIDE the pyramids... to play in a Quake style... That simply is NOT what I was expecting and wanting.

DFLW keeps the superb sound that always characterized the series, but it doesn't seem to improve on the adversaries' Artificial Intelligence. Sure, the missions will feel harder, but that is because of the new gameplay, the higher number of baddies, and... the worsen of the interface.

One novelty is the soldier's class: you have people specialized in several tasks, making them a better choice for certain missions, but that simply is not enough, nor natural for campaigns.

Too much is gone. I didn't quit on Delta Force Land Warrior yet, but I don't recommend it from my experience, until now. What a shame. If you still don't own the original DF and DF2, you'd do better buying them, instead of this spoiled mix. This is a clear show of what might go wrong, when the developers are forced to listen to dumb gamers' opinions. But maybe I am just a dumb gamer myself...