While the developers obviously took great care to be sensitive about the events the game is based on, they were a little careless with the game mechanics themselves, leading to a mixed experience that moves from fun to frustrating and back. Novalogic's Delta Force: Black Hawk Down is a mishmash of gameplay that probably won't keep you up late at night trying to finish all the levels, but it still has enough enjoyable elements to make it worth the purchase.

Gameplay

Black Hawk Down is sort of an odd duck in the gameplay department. On the one hand, you've got a multiplayer mode that offers a great mix of vehicular and ground-based combat, while on the other, you've got a single-player game that's so "on rails" at times that it leaves you feeling both unimpressed and frustrated.

Black Hawk Down is based on the U.S. military actions in Mogadishu, Somalia, wherein the United States [NOTE: "U.S." should only be used as an adjective, not a noun] was trying to take down local warlords and bring some stability to the region. The single-player missions have you performing tasks such as convoy escort, which could be quite enjoyable, were it not for the fact that they are so restrictive. Most of these single-player levels are on rails, and force you to follow the scripted AI around and hope you survive. One example is the very first level, which has you heading out to protect convoys from local warlords who are stealing food. You man the heavy machine gun on the back of a Humvee as it plows through the desert. A firefight immediately breaks out, and you've got to blast away at hordes of attackers. The problem? You have no control or where you're going. The Humvee driver stays on the road and never does anything intelligent to protect himself or you. Thus, you're left spraying fire in all directions, hoping to kill off any bandits and disable their vehicles before they take you down. I can't count the number of times I hit the directional keys hoping to take over the steering of the Hummer.

Rounds like this reminded me of the old coin-op title Operation Wolf, wherein you just blasted away at a constant stream of bad guys and the screen would move on its own to bring more enemies into view. Just as with Operation Wolf, Black Hawk Down forces you to follow a predetermined path through the swarm of attackers, while all you can do is blast away. It gets old quickly. Thankfully, there are some levels where you're on foot, and these allow for freer roaming than the vehicle-based levels. But the minute you return to vehicles, it starts to get annoying again.

In Black Hawk Down the AI borders on non-existent, which further weakens the single-player campaign. The Somali bandits (and locals) mindlessly rush into your spray of gunfire, allowing you to mow down the opposition with ease. Couple that with a weak AI for your allies, and you'll be frequently left with the feeling of playing an old-school arcade shooter where you just have to memorize where the enemies spring from and keep spraying fire in that direction.

The final nail in the campaign's coffin is the storyline, or more precisely, the lack thereof. Missions lack any cohesiveness, leaving you wondering what the whole idea behind this game was anyway. There's nothing stringing the levels together, and worse, there's no explanation for most of the actions you must undertake. Instead, you're just told to go do something, and you head out to get the job done. Personally, I like my single-player game to have a storyline to it, and Black Hawk Down has just about none.

Black Hawk Down, while a downer in single-player, is an absolute riot in online multiplayer. Thanks to a well-designed game hosting system and an easy-to-use online interface (basically a stripped-down browser), you'll be playing online on NovaWorld in no time flat. Sure, the NovaWorld server browser isn't as detailed as other game server products, but it gets the job done neatly and efficiently.

Once you're in a game, you'll find the gameplay to resemble that of most other first-person shooters, however, it's all wrapped up in huge and well-detailed environments that inspire all sorts of combat tactics. The fun factor of the online play is enhanced exponentially by the availability of combat vehicles, such as Humvees, which you can jump into and use whenever you need some serious firepower. While the game types are fairly limited, it's still a great online experience thanks to the size and scope of the environments.

Unlike most other games where you can just hide in buildings, in Black Hawk Down, you can take over makeshift gunnery posts in people's homes, or climb into the back of a wrecked truck and start blasting with the mounted .50 caliber machine gun. While the online multiplayer is faster-paced than that of Ghost Recon or Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield, the environments force you to develop realistic fighting tactics, especially when the opposition starts rolling through town in a Hummer convoy.

Black Hawk Down is a graphical hodgepodge. Vehicles and characters can be ridiculously chunky, yet weapons and textures look great. Even with the aforementioned graphical weak points, the game looks pretty good overall, and the framerate never dips too low, even when you've got the resolution settings cranked. This game will suck the life out of your video card, so if you plan on enjoying Black Hawk Down on its highest video settings, make sure you're running a high-end video card. The difference between the high- and low-quality video settings is pretty extreme, so players with low-end cards should be warned that Black Hawk Down is pretty ugly on lower resolutions.

The sound in Black Hawk Down is quite good, though at times it sounds a little too "tinny" for my liking, even with plenty of bass backing up my sound system. Weapon effects are realistic while vehicles aren't quite as true to life as they could be, but they still sound pretty good.

The single-player mode won't be inspiring anyone to play through it again any time soon. Once will be more than enough for most players, especially considering the incredibly weak AI and the basic gameplay. What will keep you coming back is the multiplayer, which offers a mix of game styles (Capture the Flag, Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, etc.) and some of the most expansive environments around. Add to that the ability to hitch a ride on a Humvee or a Black Hawk helicopter, and you'll keep coming back to this game for some time to come.

While I'm sure there are some fans of the single-player campaign out there, I found the gameplay too linear to keep the game enjoyable after a few hours of play. The AI on both sides is terribly frustrating and will have you smashing your keyboard on more than one occasion.

The multiplayer, however, is what should interest most people in Delta Force: Black Hawk Down. There's plenty of fun to be had in the online component of this game, and, dare I say, this alone is enough to make the game worth the price of admission. Since the NovaWorld servers are free, you'll be able to enjoy this game online for a long time.