Delta Force 2

The Good
Graphics are gorgeous, as voxelspace engine generates some of the best terrain in the business without using a ton of polygons. You actually feel as if you're sliding through the grass as you crawl on the ground prone.

Nice variety of weapons, but not enough of it was silenced.

The Bad
Your AI buddies are kamikaze idiots, instead of special forces soldiers. They rush headlong into incoming fire, go prone, die any way, leaving you to do all the work.

No anti-air weapon despite the fact that often you are expected to engage enemy gunships.

Unrealistic settings. While Delta boys are the elite, they are NOT supposed to be used as assault troops!

The Bottom Line
Delta Force 2 is a shooter based on the Novalogic Voxelspace engine. It generates a very convincing terrain with the hills and valleys and grassy areas and such, and as one of the top counterterrorism warriors of the United States, you'll have to count on your fellow squaddies' help as well as your superior firepower to counter enemy's overwhelming superiority.

You have a wide variety of weapons to choose from (no switching during the mission though) from assault rifles to sniper rifles to machine guns and submachine guns. You even have grenades, LAW rockets, claymores, and misc. other weapons, not to mention commando knife and pistol (usually silenced).

Youa re sent on a variety of missions chasing down first a biological threat after an unknown force attacked an Antartic bio-research lab, then a terrorist threat in Africa, in two campaigns. There is also a variety fo single missions. There are also more missions you can download from enthusiast websites, as the mission editor is included.

The HUD is easy enough to understand and quite intuitive, though switching weapon modes by pressing the key multiple times may not be as easy as first thought. Shooting at enemies is easy enough, and sniper rifles are very powerful, capable of killing enemies out to several hundred meters. Fortunately AI isn't smart enough to send out mortars and patrols to catch snipers. Game counteracts this by requiring you to enter some buildings, and do some close-quarters battles.

The hostiles do die in a variety of ways, though no ragdoll physics, just nice variety of death poses. Clipping is a problem as bodies can and do appear through walls and such.

Night-vis and scope is handled nicely, perhaps a bit TOO nicely as it doesn't really interfere much with your field of view the way they're supposed to.

The problem mainly is with the mission design, and your buddies AI.

Supposedly, you're in bravo squad, the squad that does the heavy lifting. Alpha squad is the scout, and charlie / delta squads are support. In reality, they all run ahead of you via separate paths and engage the enemy before you can catch up, and they quite often get killed since they're outnumbered like a dozen to one, then you have to sneak up and avenge them, then figure out how to complete the mission without them. That is just... pathetic.

As explained before, the AI doesn't react much to snipers other than freeze in place and look around, making them even MORE vulnerable to follow-up shots. The game counters this by hiding enemies in buildings, and thus the rest of the mission becomes a "gopher hunt".

The game does support multiplayer over NovaWorld, where dozens and dozens of players can join in huge multiplayer battles, completely with voice-over-net support (though that's often turned off to save on bandwidth). Don't lose your CD-key as you will need it!

All in all, this is a military sim "lite", with emphasis on fun, NOT realism. If you want realism, go play Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon series or even SWAT 4. On the other hand, if you want an updated version of this, go get Delta Force Xtreme, and have a blast in multiplayer.