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Delta Force: Land Warrior
By "Admiral" Nelson HernandezMultiplayer
Multiplayer is quite a bit of fun. It is handled through Novaworld’s servers or over a LAN connection. You’ve got the standard deathmatch, team deathmatch, king of the hill, capture the flag, search and destroy, attack and defend, and “flagball.” You can also play the single player missions cooperatively.
Up close and personal
The big difference in multiplayer is that people can take more than one shot. If you hit someone in the head they will generally die, but shoot them in the foot and they are likely to just get angry. What I found a little strange, though, is that people could take multiple hits with my trusty .50 cal. I’m pretty sure being hit with a bullet that size just about anywhere would ruin your day. People also use knives a lot more online, because in Novaworld’s ranking system you get more points for killing someone with a knife (which remains a one hit-one kill weapon). The point system also reveals an interesting bit of Novalogic philosophy: you lose no points for dying.
Conclusion
I think that last fact says a lot about this game. In real life, dying is something we usually try to avoid. In DF3, it is a temporary impediment to getting more kills. The generally cavalier attitude toward reality and the lack of any kind of penalty for having your teammates die also reflect this philosophy, which continually reminds you that you are only playing a game.
This may sound like a harsh review. It is because this series, like Novalogic’s flight simulators, has put itself in the middle of two genres: the simple, fun twitchers like Quake and the more sophisticated, serious simulations like Rogue Spear. Since at the outset it demands to be taken seriously, I’ve evaluated it as such and found it lacking. The bones are there for a realistic sim to be built, and graphically it sets a high standard. But in everything else the game’s missions play more like a Hollywood action film than real counterterrorist operations. And if you stack the game up against more casual first person shooters, it doesn’t quite hit the fun factor as much as those do.
Darling, we’ll always have Baghdad
So in the end I found Delta Force Land Warrior to be somewhat unsatisfying. Yet the game is commercially successful nonetheless and I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw more of this series. Perhaps it is because it fills a niche: the desire to play a game that has realistic overtones without making the demands of the player that a truly authentic game would.
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