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Last week, I was excitedly invited to the Tencent offices in LA to preview the upcoming Black Hawk Down campaign for Delta Force by developer Team Jade. Along with several other journalists, we were able to try three separate missions from the campaign and experience the true grit of the 1992 Somali famine and the United Nations civil war. The visuals were incredibly stunning, and it’s interesting to see just how advanced games within the war genre have advanced from titles like Call of Duty or Medal of Honor. Despite not necessarily being the most accessible for those who don’t typically play first-person shooters, I will admit that after every mission, win or lose, I felt a genuine sense of completion and pride in my role on the squad.
Fight for Real or Get Out
Let me preface this entire preview by saying I’m not a massive war first-person shooter player. I’ll admit that I enjoy the FPS genre, but I don’t typically play them when their stories include or are about war. So, when my team of three and I picked up our controllers to play through the first mission they had us try out, I was surprised at how foreign it felt. No, it wasn’t foreign in that it’s a problematic or completely different game than one would expect from a shooter, but it genuinely felt as though Team Jade consulted military personnel for the most realistic and personal experience.
In war, you don’t typically get shot 10 times and still have enough of a second wind to knife the guy after jumping across a balcony onto a veranda that every sniper on the map is camping on. I was genuinely surprised when I was shot once, and my screen immediately went black as my team was notified that one of their own was down. In fact, all four of my teammates were surprised that the mission only lasted about a minute or so because we’re all so used to being shot at several times before going down
I wouldn’t necessarily consider the Black Hawk Down campaign to be accessible to all types of players. However, I can definitely say that as someone who enjoys the idea of beating a game, regardless of what type it is, I found myself continuously striving to be better. If we failed a mission because we needed snipers, I would change up my role for the next one and see what I could have done differently. Typically, (and don’t judge me on this), I would have just kept trying again and again in the same role until we pushed through.
The Perfect Balance of Chaos and Fun
I realized very quickly that the Black Hawk Down campaign does an incredible job of balancing the fun of playing an FPS and the chaos of staying alive to see the mission to the end. Personally, I never really enjoyed the railroading of many wartime shooters that expect you to see the mission through exactly as the developer intended. Every mission we played through, I was able to journey through buildings and genuinely traverse through the battlefield the way that an actual soldier would do so. It helped make gameplay far more believable while also allowing you to genuinely collaborate with teammates instead of paving the way for one person to jump in and clear everyone out without talking to anyone.
I’ll definitely admit that I’m the type of player to go ahead and start wreaking havoc just to get things done. I’m also the kind of player who does this without ever once telling anyone in the chat that I’m doing it. However, you simply can’t do that with this kind of gameplay. What if you go ahead and get knocked out at a hot spot for snipers? You can’t possibly expect your team to try to come and save you at the expense of getting obliterated themselves. Black Hawk Down makes you think a bit before jumping in without telling anyone what you’re doing. It made me remember that not all games are about running and gunning.
My squad and I spent about 10 minutes or more in each mission and didn’t get the chance to see any of them to the end while we were there. However, that only solidified my opinions on the game’s difficulty and what sort of players I’ll expect to see online: hardcore wartime shooters who plan to spend a half hour or more perfecting their strategies and ensuring that no one on their team goes down even once.
The Future of Black Hawk Down is Here
I’ve never read the book, watched the film, or played the original Black Hawk Down game, but from my conversations with some of the other journalists who attended the preview event, I can tell that it is a well-beloved franchise. The campaign proved to me to be a difficult and enjoyable experience that’s best done with others who are actively talking into the microphone and communicating with their team. It’s a true, gritty wartime campaign that doesn’t mask the difficulties of maneuvering through an explosive battlefield while ensuring you and your own are safe.
With the release of the campaign already at our heels, it’s safe to say that it’s one of the more polished and performative shooters I’ve experienced, either playing or watching. The gameplay is superb while the visuals deeply motivate you to look around and engage with the best ways to move forward. Each mission is very much your own to complete however you wish while everyone still has a common goal in the back of their minds: get out together and get out alive. Considering that the base game is free on Steam, I would highly recommend anyone who doesn’t typically play FPS games to jump in and live the experience for yourselves.
