Delta Force: Black Hawk Down (2025)

Although Ridley Scott's portrayal of the Battle of Mogadishu never reaches the same heights as Saving Private Ryan in particular, it is one of the best war films ever made. Mark Bowden's gripping book was turned into a powerful script that became a sandy brown cross-section of one of many bloody battles for Somalia, drenched in character, intensity, presence, and explosiveness. I really love Black Hawk Down and I remember really liking the 2003 Delta Force: Black Hawk Down original (developed by Novalogic). So, to say that expectations for Chinese Team Jade's hyped-up 2025 remake have been high would be an exaggeration of quite considerable proportions.

This review is (as the title obviously suggests) only about the licence-based, story-driven co-op portion of the new Delta Force and does not include the Battlefield-inspired multiplayer component that will be reviewed separately. Here we play through Ridley Scott's film in the role of Sergeant Matt Eversmann and Team Jade has spoken several times about how they struggled to emulate and recreate all the best parts of the film. While the mutiplayer portion of the new Delta Force is based on a modified version of Unreal Engine 4 and offers the player vast, large, open environments, the Black Hawk Down portion is extremely claustrophobic in terms of the design and structure of the levels, taking me and three friends through what are basically corridors, and thus very reminiscent of 15-year-old Call of Duty missions.

Team Jade has said themselves that they are big, big fans of Novalogic's 2003 original and that they are big fans of Scott's film too. However, it's relatively difficult to see this when you're dragging three friends through these missions because relatively little is recognisable, or feels particularly representative of what the source material looks like. Scott's dense, dark, heavy, serious battles and natural chaos (war is hell, and all that) have been lost here as this game feels more like a rather dumbed-down shooting gallery from 2001. The only thing that feels modern is the graphics, which through Unreal Engine 5 are often brilliant.

Call of Duty rewrote the rulebook for this type of war game with Modern Warfare (2007) and, to be honest, it hasn't changed a bit since then. Last year's game Black Ops 6 feels just as corridor-like as it did 15 years ago and in my opinion this is not something that other competing developers should emulate. Yet that's exactly what Team Jade has done, using Modern Warfare (2007) as a template and moulding the same kind of arcade shooting gallery corridors in the same kind of brain-dead Michael Bay spirit that Infinity Ward did all those years ago. To me, this feels old, stale, stiff, stupid, and frankly, really dumb. Me and my four-man team are shuttled between different parts of the Somali capital, shooting enemies who are either so stupid that they don't notice that I'm standing behind them with the gun about nine centimetres from the back of their heads, or who spot me from 400 metres away in the pitch black of night (without night vision goggles) and with their rusty AK-47s manage to hit 100% of their shots, even though I move like a feisty weasel between cover and obstacles, and sometimes even despite being behind a cement wall.

Adding to the issue is the fact that the game mechanics feel rigid and limited. There's no melee attack here, a flaw that in my opinion belongs in the 90s and makes some enemy encounters downright bizarre. The weapons are mostly okay, but there's a lack of realism in how they're portrayed, and that arcade gloss shines through and hurts the sense of intensity and presence. I also have a problem with the fact that you can't play through these missions by yourself, even with computer-controlled allies. You need to have three pals with you, in co-op, otherwise the game won't start. For us, it took four hours and seven minutes to play through all seven chapters and in the end I can't say it was particularly entertaining, exciting, or difficult. At least not challenging in a good way beyond the fact that some enemies have hawk eyes...

Gorgeous Unreal Engine 5 graphics and a pricey movie licence certainly don't save Delta Force: Black Hawk Down from being one of the year's biggest disappointments so far.