With Call of Duty being the industry standard for shooters, games like Escape from Tarkov, Battlefield 2042, Counter-Strike 2, PUBG Battlegrounds, and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege look to bring realistic experiences to gamers. Despite some being more authentic, they have failed to overtake Call of Duty’s market stranglehold.

At Summer Game Fest, Team Jade alongside TiMi Studio Group revealed new footage for their upcoming game Delta Force: Hawk Ops. During the Summer Game Fest Play Days, we had the chance to meet with Team Jade and get a hands-on preview of Delta Force: Hawk Ops. Before going into the meeting, I was curious how would Delta Force: Hawk Op hold up to some of its competitors.

During our behind-closed-doors meeting, we had the opportunity to preview the Havoc Warfare and Hazard Operations game modes. The Black Hawk Down Story mode was available to select on the screen, but sadly we couldn’t get a sneak peek.

Havok Warfare

Up first for the demo, we were allowed to try out and explore the Havoc Warfare game mode; this game mode is most similar to the Ground War game mode in Call of Duty. Each team spawns on one side of the map and they push to secure different objectives.

As we pushed to capture the objective, we noticed that the enemy’s forces dug in deeper holding a variety of choke points. For an AI match, the bots were surprisingly tactical and caught us off guard a few times.

In the demo, we were allowed to try a variety of different weapons to see how they looked and felt. As someone who prefers to use a controller, playing on mouse and keyboard was a bit of a learning curve.

It probably took until 10 minutes into the match to get used to aiming down sights and shooting at the enemy. While firing we noticed that there was bullet drop, so we had to adjust our shots to make up for the trajectory.

The developer wanted us to try out different weapons and adjust the attachments available. Trying to do that while also trying to take the objective was fairly difficult.

While trying to capture the objective, there was an interesting moment that happened. I tried killing myself so that I could change weapons quickly. Rather than dying outright, we went into a down-but-not-out seated prone status.

When trying to force a respawn, a teammate came over and revived me. Now, normally that’s all I want, but the bot kept doing it. So it took me about three minutes to finally change weapons. While respawning, we sadly lost the match due to the enemy capturing both positions.

Hazard Operations

After losing in Havok Warfare, a member of the Team Jade staff got in the game. Hazard Operations revolves around your squad of players deploying to an area to complete an objective. While in the zone, rival squads and the local militia will attempt to stop you.

Before deploying, you need to choose the gear that you want to use and the gear you choose will determine how much you can deploy with and how much you can extract with. Before we loaded in, the Team Jade Staff let me know that I was missing equipment; this equipment was the difference between having 12 inventory slots and 40 inventory slots.

With our loadout ready, we were set to take on the world. The only problem now was that our partner didn’t speak any English. Thankfully, the developers have put in multiple ways for people to alert one another of potential danger.

On top of that, we could still hear our partner scream out when he was being shot at or unfortunately went down. He was definitely way more into it than I was. In a way, it’s nice to see developers so enthralled with their games.

Rushing through the map looking for items and shooting enemies was fun in Delta Force: Hawk Ops. It was nice to have AI that didn’t feel like walking targets and offered more of a challenge. In a way, it reminded me of what I loved so much about the SOCOM franchise.

In those classic tactical shooters, bots wouldn’t wait around for you to shoot them. Like in Delta Force: Hawk Ops, they come out of hiding, hunt you down, and make an example of you.

Delta Force: Hawk Ops is launching sometime in 2024 for Windows PC (via Steam and the Epic Games Store), Xbox consoles, PlayStation consoles, and smartphones.