Delta Force Black Hawk Down Steam Rating

Three days have passed since Delta Force released its Black Hawk Down campaign. The game’s single-player addition to Team Jade’s free-to-play tactical shooter is an adaptation of Ridley Scott’s homonymous blockbuster.

While the Black Hawk Down movie won two Academy Awards and cemented itself as one of the best war flicks ever made, the Delta Force campaign opened to ‘mostly negative’ reviews on Steam. Out of 3,300 Steam reviews at the time of writing, only 1,175 (35%) are positive.

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Part of the poor initial reception is universally accepted: whereas Delta Force runs smooth as butter on even mediocre computers, the campaign is extremely unstable.

Many players are facing crashes before the first level ever finishes loading. Those that do get through are experiencing stutters, arbitrary freezes, and other performance issues that fall well short of Delta Force‘s typically spotless optimization.

The community consensus ends there though. Putting performance issues aside, the Delta Force community is torn.

Did Team Jade make an impossibly hard campaign? Have FPS players gone soft? Is there any room for nuance in Mogadishu’s dusty, bloodied streets?

The Black Hawk Down Difficulty Question

Before the campaign came out, DualShocker’s Ethan Krieger got to spend some time with it and chat with the developers.

One of the standout points was that the campaign has no difficulty settings. The fights are what they are, so you either get good or die trying.

As made clear in Steam reviews and social media threads, a lot of people are stuck in the latter stage.

The first point of contention is the level design, which is specifically built with four-player co-op in mind. While you do get some survivability buffs when playing solo, it’s not nearly enough to compensate for the enemy’s numerical superiority.

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Beyond that, the gameplay balance leans heavily towards milsim, in stark contrast with Delta Force‘s lax approach to realism in multiplayer.

You can drop most enemies with a shot or two, but they can return the favor. Your team can pick you up, but medkits dry up quickly during firefights.

Like the Delta and Ranger soldiers in 1993, your team only has the ammo it brought into missions.

The support class gives you extra rounds to distribute between your team, but that only helps if the person filling that role cooperates.

As there are no recorded cases of soldiers having to use captured weapons during the Battle of Mogadishu, you don’t have that as a cop-out for poor trigger discipline.

The missions are not particularly long, but Delta Force went in without either a checkpoint or a respawn system. If you die, you have to start over.

Bad Reviews Are Not Bad News

Despite the discontent, there is a solid mass of players who believe the campaign is the perfect sweet spot of difficulty and realism.

This is the strength that Delta Force has to leverage over its competitors, and players can only hope that Team Jade does not fold in the face of criticism.

Delta Force is an awkward but beautiful mix of Battlefield, Escape From Tarkov, and Six Days in Fallujah.

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When playing becomes learning.

There is no world where a single difficulty setting or gameplay mechanics would please players across all three camps.

The majority of Delta Force players do not regularly delve into every mode. Those that do tend to change things up precisely for variety’s sake.

Yes, having only a third of reviews speak positively of a game looks bad on paper, but let’s reframe this for a moment: a third of Call of Duty and Battlefield-style players are pleased with a hardcore campaign that does not make any concessions.

ARMA Reforger or Six Days in Fallujah could only dream of having this many casual players making the jump into hardcore gameplay.