The good and the bad of the Delta Force: Hawk Ops PC alpha

What do you get if you take Battlefield and Tarkov and smush them together? The answer is Delta Force: Hawk Ops, the new first-person shooter that everyone is in a tizzy about. Currently in a closed alpha exclusive to PC, I’ve spent about 35 hours playing through the two available modes trying to make heads or tails of whether developer Team Jade has something special on its hands.

So… Battlefield and Tarkov?

The modes available in Hawk Ops at the moment are Havoc Warfare - A/D (Battlefield-like) and Tactical Turmoil (Tarkov-like). Each mode features its own progression and unlock tracks, but players can take any Operator they’ve unlocked into either of the modes. Operators are individual characters that fit into the game’s four classes: Assault, Support, Engineer, and Recon, so the Battlefield vibe is very much there.

Havoc Warfare features two maps called Ascension and Cracked. Ascension sees attackers land on a beach via boat and fight their way inland and up a cliff that reminds me a lot of Damavand Peak from Battlefield 3. Cracked has a small village surrounded by desert where you fight mostly in buildings, on the street, and even down narrow alleyways.

In the A/D (attack/defense) mode, attackers must take two objectives to capture a sector. If they manage to capture a sector they push the defenders back to the next sector. Take all the sectors before running out of tickets (lives), and the attackers win. The defenders can win by simply holding even one of the objectives from the final sector and draining the attackers of all their tickets.

Tactical Turmoil is an extraction mode where you enter as a solo, duo, or a team of three. You are there to shoot both AI and human players, loot, and escape to one of the extraction points. The mode is supported by an upgrade path that allows you to expand your base of operations, and a market to buy and sell with other players. Of course, there’s a risk involved with this mode as you could be the one who doesn’t make it out of a mission alive, losing all the gear you took with you in the process.

Don’t we have Battlefield and Tarkov at home?

The first thing to note about Hawk Ops is that no matter the mode, the gunplay, visuals, and sounds are top notch. Not that you don’t get the same things from Tarkov and Battlefield, but in order to stand a chance against the staples of the genres, Hawk Ops had to be able to hang in those categories, and it does.

To break off into the individual modes, where I find Tactical Turmoil interesting is how approachable it is. Yes, you can lose all your gear and go broke, but the mode is more inviting than Tarkov. I’ve wanted to get into an extraction shooter for a long time, but the learning curve didn’t feel worth my time. Tactical Turmoil does things a little differently, such as not requiring you to manually load your magazines with rounds, showing you a map with markers for safes, missions, extractions, and more. It has a squad system that fills your team even if you don’t have friends that play. It does all of this while maintaining the risk of losing your gear and has a deep medical system. It walks the fine line between hardcore and approachable in a way that is brilliant.

Havoc Warfare, on the other hand, is starting to show cracks for me. It still maintains the wonderful gunplay, visuals, and sounds, but falls into some of the same traps that Battlefield does, and even manages to catch itself in a few that Battlefield avoids.

For starters, the maps in Havoc Warfare, while gorgeous, are smaller than Battlefield, which is fine, except that they are too narrow, and the shifting boundaries are immersion killers. A smaller map isn’t an issue with small team sizes, but Havoc Warfare packs 64 players and several vehicles into a map that, in the case of Cracked, is probably a quarter the size of some Battlefield maps. This leads to gameplay that is utter chaos, which can be fun in small doses, but eventually feels like you’re at the mercy of that chaos and not your own strategies and skills.

The boundaries are an entirely different frustration, as the narrow maps eliminate flanking routes and limit vehicle play in a way that makes players too passive for fear of losing them. In Ascension’s lone helicopter, pilots camp off the map, far from danger and often beyond the game’s draw distance. The moving borders make this worse, as the playable area changes as attackers advance. In Cracked, if you are defending C1 in the final sector, you can be inside the objective, fighting an enemy across the street, and that enemy is out of bounds for you. You’re fish in a barrel. While I understand not letting defenders spawn camp attackers, there’s a balance that is non-existent here.

What Havoc Warfare does exceptionally well that Battlefield doesn’t (this exists in Tactical Turmoil too) is weapon customization. It’s incredible to build your perfect weapon with dozens of attachments and configurations, tailoring it to your style of play. Yeah, I know this exists in other extraction shooters, but it’s an advantage that Havoc Warfare specifically has over Battlefield.

The worst part

Everything I’ve critiqued thus far pales in comparison to the always-on, in-game, global text chat. This seemingly cannot be turned off, although you can switch it to squad only. Unfortunately, if you leave the main menu, it will be back on the global chat when you return. If you haven’t guessed the problem yet, it’s that you see the most disgusting things human beings can say in this chat, and there’s basically nothing you can do besides constantly change it from global to squad. Pick a topic people like to be horrible about, and anyone who has played a couple of hours of Hawk Ops has seen disgusting things said about that topic.

This is inexcusable, even for an alpha. No game should ever see the light of day without protecting the people who play it from this kind of garbage. Hawk Ops doesn’t even do the basics. There is seemingly no list of commonly used, awful words that are censored. If there is, they missed the worst, most obvious words.

We’ll see how it goes

From a gameplay perspective, I’m encouraged by a lot of what I see from Hawk Ops, even if I do think that we’re firmly in the honeymoon phase of this experience, which will end. There are a lot of things that it does exceptionally well, and a lot that it needs to improve on when it comes to Havoc Warfare, but there’s something here. I’m just hoping that someone from Team Jade drops everything they’re doing and fixes the problem with global text chat yesterday.

This preview is based on a digital download code provided by the publisher. 

Bill Lavoy

Managing Editor

Bill, who is also known as Rumpo, is a lifelong gamer and Toronto Maple Leafs fan. He made his mark early in his career through guide writing and a deep understanding of editorial SEO. He enjoys putting in the work to create a great content, be it a wild feature or grinding out an in-depth collectible guide. Tweet him @RumpoPlays if you have a question or comment about one of his articles.