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Delta Force: Task Force Dagger

by James Sterrett

Article Type: Review
Article Date: August 20, 2002

Product Info

Product Name: Delta Force: Task Force Dagger
Category: Squad-based Tactical Shooter
Developer: Zombie
Publisher: NovaLogic
Release Date: May 2002
System Req: TBA
Files & Links: Click Here

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And There's the Bell!

Autumn, 2001: The United States decides to try its hand in Round the Umpteenth of the Afghan Wars. Summer, 2002: Novalogic and Zombie Studios release a Delta Force: Land Warrior game based on battles in the initial months. Is Task Force Dagger a cheapo knockoff or solid game? We grabbed our khaki mice and infiltrated the CD to investigate.

Hey kid, want a ride in my rubber boat?

The Land Warrior engine has been around for a few years, and not much has changed. It sports Novalogic’s Voxel look, with huge vistas and incredibly steep mountains being the order of the day—rather a good match for Afghanistan. As with prior titles in the series, Task Force Dagger sports a slightly relaxed approach to realism. While you cannot carry amazing amounts of ammunition, or take incredible amounts of damage, explosions are small, enemies are slow to react and their hit bubbles are generous. Things get a bit tougher at the highest difficulty level, or even easier at the lowest. Most players will spend a great deal of time sniping, and sniping is pretty easy to do. The Delta Force philosophy is that the best-trained soldiers in the world are great snipers, and since that is who they are simulating, you are given the skills of a great sniper by the game.

This is close range for sniping

Air Strikes…Good!

The niftiest new thing in TFD is the airstrikes that some missions allow you to call in. Lase the target, call for the strike, and a little while later, an F-18 or a B-52 swings past and blows the target apart. Or not… The scripting for these events is flaky, so sometimes the strike doesn’t come, even after telling you it is "inbound and hot". When a mission requires you to destroy a target with airpower in order to win it, this becomes rather problematic. The other cool toy is an orbiting UAVs which carries a camera you can look through. It’s nifty, but not incredibly useful, because zooming into on anything close enough to get useful intelligence, while the UAV swoops around, is a pain.

The UAV view

You can also choose to play as a soldier from any of ten different elite organizations, which split into five specializations: Medic, Heavy Gunner, Sniper, Close Quarters Battle, and Grenadier. Each of these gives different perks. Snipers have a steady aim with the scope, while CQB specialists move more quickly. The differences are real, but so much of the combat is at long range that the advantages enjoyed by the snipers is pretty decisive. TFD offers a wide variety of weapons to play with, though it is probable most players will quickly settle on favorites and not shift much from them. To keep the choices less difficult, you can carry a sniper rifle for long-range work, plus a submachine gun for CQB, plus a pistol just in case, plus grenades since you never know when you’ll need them, plus some kind of heavy explosive—and it’s usually only the latter that you’ll vary, between contact-fused Claymore mines, AT-4 anti-tank rockets, or SLAM radio-detonated explosives packs.

AT-4s and Mi-24s: Perfect Together

Gameplay

Of course, the game ships with extensive multiplayer options. Delta Force has a large online following and this angle of the game seems to be in good, solid shape. Gameplay types range from standard team deathmatches through variations on Search and Destroy missions in which one or both sides must attempt to destroy targets in the other team’s area, while protecting their own.

One bomb, coming up!

Thirty bucks nets you 25 missions, all of which are based on actual operations in Afghanistan to some degree. The bulk of the missions are strictly solo affairs, and in fact practically all of them boil down to sniping as many of the enemy as you can, then engaging in close-quarters battle to winkle out the rest. There are some different missions, such as one in which you must snipe enemies from a moving helicopter, and another in which you have to prevent an Al Qaeda group from crossing into Pakistan. A number of others, however, suggest you need to employ stealth, and it turns out to be untrue. Opening fire early and often, especially from long range with a silenced sniper rifle, is almost always the best route to success.

This is the nicest-looking cave in the game

The actual fidelity to Afghanistan doesn’t seem to be all that incredibly high, since virtually every mission is run solo and the voxel terrain looks a bit other-worldly, but there’s a reasonable degree of the right kind of feel to matters. A clever touch is the use of multiple missions over the same ground to simulate the idea of multiple simultaneous missions. Thus, for example, the Kandahar airport is the target of a series of raids, each targeting some different aspect of the airbase.

This compromise method of showing complex operations is forced by the weaknesses of the Land Warrior engine in dealing with friendlies. They can run around, and in one mission they even shoot at the enemy, but the enemy ignores them. You also have no control over them, so their presence in a mission is interesting but not especially engaging. Kudos to Zombie for being clever with the missions, but the limitations of the engine do show up nonetheless.

A helicopter ride!

Limitations

Worse limitations show up in the mission scripting, which is extremely flaky and often breaks. It’s fortunate that you can play through all of the campaign missions as single missions, since it reduces the frustration of trying to play through the campaign only to discover that many missions often won’t recognize the fact that you’ve won (but sometimes they do, for no good reason). Almost as frustrating, the mission briefings don’t list all your objectives, so you learn to check the actual objective list (press G) to find out what you’re really meant to do. The minimalist manual often doesn’t help much when you wonder if it’s some error of yours that’s responsible for the hang-up, and the training mission is fairly basic as well, with segments on using various classes of weapons and not much more.

WElcome to Tora Bora

Voxel Getting Long in the Tooth

All in all, TFD shows some clever design, but it is held back but the flaws in its scripting and the quality of the competition. The scripting flaws break the game’s immersion and will tick off even veteran fans of Delta Force. More damning is the march of progress: those who prefer Operation Flashpoint are likely to find TFD unengaging because of the lack of meaningful squadmates and the sterile feel of an older terrain engine. For $30, it’s not bad for fans of the kind of semi-realistic action shooter Delta Force has long provided, but for the same price you can pick up the much newer and more immersive Operation Flashpoint. If you are a Novalogic fan, though, Task Force Dagger will be exactly what you wanted.




Review System:
  • CPU: AthlonXP 1900
  • RAM: 256MB RAM
  • Video: GeForce3



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