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Hands on with Vivendi's Delta Force on mobile

The squad's back in action

Hands on with Vivendi's Delta Force on mobile
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| Delta Force

You'd think there were enough war-torn locations in the world for game developers not to have to invent new ones. Nevertheless, the first level of Vivendi's tasty squad-based shooter Delta Force (which is the follow up to 2006's Black Hawk Down: Team Sabre), sees you fighting your way through an Estonian conflict zone. Maybe some of those Brit stag party goers went a little too far?

The top-down game itself is a more realistic affair, though. Your three man squad consists of a standard M16-equipped grunt, a sniper, and a weakly armed engineer. The latter takes the utility mantle, defusing mines, calling in air strikes, and holding the squad's health packs.

You toggle between each of them using the '0' key. You don't directly control their movements, however. Instead, you move an icon in the shape of a pair of feet using the cursors keys. These feet remain green when in a location you can move your soldiers to, and turn red otherwise. Pressing '5' with green feet gets your selected soldier moving to that location, or hitting '#' moves all three there.

The really neat thing about this system is that it combines movement with weapons. For example, if you move the feet over an out-of-range enemy and press '5', your soldier will move until said target is in range, at which point the green feet will turn into a target icon. Cue the gunfire of freedom.

You can see a short video of how it plays out here:

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The system works similarly with the engineer and tasks such as defusing mines. It's slightly different in the case of the sniper thanks to his long-range targeting ability. Hitting the '*' button, brings up a wobbly sniper view (basically a 2D scope view that moves around a bit). You can then directly move the wobbling cross-hairs over any in-range enemy using the cursor. Frankly, from what we saw the sniper's incredibly powerful, and so the temptation is to hide your grunt and engineer in a safe location and hunt as the sniper, at least while his ammo lasts. The only apparent balance to this strategy is that if one of the squad dies, it's game over for everyone. Still, fighting our way through a tight urban environment by carefully moving the individual squad members, trying to avoid the civilians, as well as making full use of strategically-placed explosive barrels and taking out the large number of bad guys made our first experience of Delta Force relatively satisfying.

It's certainly one game we'll be looking forward to playing more when it's released as part of Vivendi Mobile's summer line-up. Click 'Track It!' to be alerted when we review.

Jon Jordan
Jon Jordan
A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon can turn his hand to anything except hand turning. He is editor-at-large at PG.biz which means he can arrive anywhere in the world, acting like a slightly confused uncle looking for the way out. He likes letters, cameras, imaginary numbers and legumes.