A lot came out of my hands-on time with Delta Force: Hawk Ops that I didn’t expect. I didn’t know it was a top-to-bottom reboot of the 1999 military shooter series, painstakingly reimagined in Unreal Engine 5. I never would have guessed that it was trying to shoot not one, not two, but three different contemporary shooter subgenres at once. And I never thought my short time with him would make me want to play more of his heavy run-and-gun tactics.
Jade development team studio head Leo Yao first answered my most obvious question: “How did a Chinese studio get their hands on such an American franchise?” In short, THQ Nordic acquired the assets from the original developer NovaLogic back in 2016 and was lost in the Embracer Group mess. until it was rescued by Tencent a few years ago. “I’ve always had a soft spot for the series,” Yao told me, adding that beyond the personal connection, the team saw great potential in reviving the franchise in 2024. It’s not enough to just remake the original game with a shiny new coat of paint. They expand this into a massive game with three distinct experiences: an extensive team PvP mode; an extraction shooter a la DMZ or The Cycle; and a single-player campaign hoping to recapture the magic of military shooters of yesteryear.
Much of this potential is in the adaptation of the 2003 book Black Hawk Down about the battle for Mogadishu. As the most recognizable entry in the series, Yao told me, it served as the perfect re-entry point and the best place to start the reinvention process. The first big change is that this version of the single-player campaign will be based on the Ridley Scott film of the same name, including the footage rights. He didn’t tell me the specifics of how any of that would fit into the campaign, or how the rest of the game’s near-future tech and aesthetics would potentially change the story based on an early 90s event. I didn’t get time with that specifically either, but he did mention that the team’s goal is to make it a challenging and intense FPS experience where bullets are extremely deadly and getting caught out of position could spell disaster.
I spent most of my time with Havoc Warfare, Hawk Ops in Battlefield’s Breakthrough, where the attackers have to take the defenders’ points of interest and push their zones of control further and further back until they disappear from the map entirely. The first big difference between Hawk Ops and similar games is in the loading screen. I had four different characters to choose from, each with a set of special abilities, weapons, and tools that made them unique from each other—much like Specialists in the Call of Duty series, but with three or four unique actions per character. I’ve been warming up with Kai, who is mostly your standard assault shooter who can temporarily speed up, but also has a nifty rocket fire that’s great for clearing tight spaces. With Terry being able to drone targets and immobilize them for a short period of time, I really had to dive into some more tactical options as well as placing mines to catch enemies moving around targets.
The map I played had a few key fortified areas where using a little scouting before attacking really made the difference between getting the objective and being stopped on the line. Unfortunately, I’ve played in matches that were occupied mostly by bots, and without pings or commands it was almost impossible to coordinate these skills between players to make big gains, but the potential for combining abilities for huge gains is written on the wall. Team Jade told me that the other maps will test your team’s tactical awareness even further, introducing a mix of indoor and outdoor objectives and verticality, as well as vehicle and weapon placements that can help teams gain an edge or hold a solid defense.
Before you even choose your characters, you can play around with loadouts or spend in-game currency to purchase any of the dozens of weapons and equipment available. What’s remarkable about the customizability in Hawk Ops is that not only do weapons have huge potential to have bits and bobs added to them, all of which have some impact on gameplay, but each of these pieces can also be further modified. And not just colors, materials, or textures, but the actual size of pieces like barrels and cheek guards can be adjusted to allow for even finer weapon modifications. I don’t think I have what it takes to fine-tune the lengths of all my favorite weapon suppressors, but for those looking for an extra layer of optimization, Hawk Ops has what you need.
Dukes of Hazard
Item progression gets a little more complicated when you get into Hazard Operation, Hawk Ops’ extraction shooter. Weapons and mods can be bought from the larger market (and can be painstakingly modified like in other modes), but can be permanently lost if you’re shot down during a deployment. Yao sneered when I mentioned the prospect of a player losing a weapon, they spent an inordinate amount of time fumbling over it before the sudden hail of bullets. “The risk/reward elements of extraction shooters will be very present.” If you come across someone else’s rare weapon in the field and you don’t see the same value in it yourself, you can sell it on the open market for in-game currency, a feature that is also present in games like Escape from Tarkov.
When you deploy to Hazard Operations, your goal is to pick up anything of value and take it back to base to sell. It could be another player’s prized weapons and armor, or rare treasures that serve the sole purpose of being truly valuable when resold, like a fancy futuristic VR console or some kind of super fancy high-tech medical equipment that I found on my way Brightly marked locations on the map highlight locks that have a higher chance of containing something valuable and are likely hotspots for enemy player activity.
Among these points of interest are various campsites, natural features such as caves and cliffs, and old company buildings converted into fortifications for the many AI mobs that put your life and belongings at risk. These regular enemies will never be as significant a threat as other players, but at least they keep the pressure on you to move carefully and also provide opportunities to pick up essential gear like ammo and health to keep you fueled for extended deployments. . Not all of these NPC enemies are pushovers, though. There are enemy bosses on the map with high health and rarer gear that provide players with an extra challenge in exchange for a higher chance of great loot. The one I found was covered from head to toe in bulletproof armor and several goons were attacking my flank, but with the right strategy heading into his lair I found a way to take him down.
While I was only able to try out one map, Yao and the team assured me that there will be multiple maps at launch, each with their own layout and points of interest. Something that really interested me was how character selection can affect your chances of survival. I was led to choose a medic support character as he had self-heal and some reliable smoke deployment options to keep your movements hidden from buried threats. I can’t help but wonder how picking someone like Luna with her Hawkeye-like trick arrows would go down in that setting.
Delta Force: Hawk Ops may share a lineage with the old PC series of the same name, but it doesn’t have many similarities. Its single-player mode is reworked from the ground up with modern technology, old-school difficulty, and the blockbuster film Black Hawk Down, which serves as both reference and inspiration. Its two multiplayer offerings—a large-scale crawler and a dynamic extraction shooter—help emphasize how Hawk Ops’ level and character design puts team composition and tactical decision-making ahead of twitch shooting. Will all his ambitions come together in a game that has the power to steal you from your current eternal game? Time will show.