Delta Force Task Force Dagger PC Games and Downloads

Jonny Austin rates the first title to have based its storyline on Afghanistan and the events of the last year...ooh, touchy.

Take over the Kandahar Airport! Raid rebel headquarters in Mazar-e-Sharif! Ambush a convoy near the Pakistani border! Demolish bunkers in the foothills of Kabul! You can do all of this in Delta Force: Task Force Dagger. Yep it was bound to happen. Now you too can fight The War Against Terror from the comfort of your own bedroom. Or if you're not American, maybe you could find a half-decent game not selling itself on the back of last year's misery instead.

But I'm not going to take a political stance on the issue. I'm here to objectively tell you whether this game is worth your money.

Chances are, it's not.

For the unitiated, the Delta Force series of games are not based on the stupendously awful Chuck Norris films. That would be silly. But they are pitched as realistic war simulators. You know, one-hit deaths, volatile real-world situations, gameplay based more on tactics than reflexes. Two years ago Delta Force: Land Warrior built up a middling following due to some fair gameplay dynamics and interesting features - unfortunately, while the rest of the world has moved on considerably in that time, the Delta Force series hasn't.

No, I mean it really hasn't. Task Force Dagger is Land Warrior in almost every conceivable way, loosely wearing a new skin and hoping people won't notice.

What this means for starters is that it's quite an ugly thing, built around a rickety old engine. The fact that the first thing you see when playing the bootcamp training level is the sparse interior of a helicopter, complete with lame-looking 2D pilot and co-pilot, doesn't bode well. The voxel-based terrain doesn't look much prettier - sure, it allows for an impressive draw distance but it's also pretty unstable for a land mass, shifting uncomfortably when you scan the horizon and shimmering in a manner that threatens to bring on an epileptic fit.

Animation is clunky, character models are very dated, buildings and vehicles lack any attention to detail and your weapons just look shoddy (they're 2D forchrissakes). Add to this the fact that I had trouble running the game smoothly on a top gaming PC (the game jitters all over the place when the action really heats up). Add the fact that the third-person viewpoint camera (you can also play it from the first person) is so bad it's unusable, and all in all it amounts to a bit of a minger.

The AI also offers many moments of hilarity. The terrorist soldiers never know what's going on, and they'll either happily watch while you gun down their compadres, or ineffectively run towards you while you're shooting at them. They don't attempt to use cover and they don't tend to fire their weapons with any accuracy.

Whatever you do, don't confuse the plodding gameplay for stealth and tactics. So you need to lean round the odd corner and crouch behind a sand dune every now and then but it doesn't make the experience any less shallow. It certainly doesn't come close to the level of cerebral challenge present in a real tactical game like Operation Flashpoint or even the ages-old Hidden & Dangerous . Every mission seems to consist mainly of sneaking around the outskirts of a camp taking out visible guards with a sniper rifle before storming into the compound and mopping up the survivors in more close-range combat.

Two years ago Land Warrior was a fair effort. Today, Task Force Dagger is inferior in every way to certain free mods (the multiplayer modes in particular fall down when compared to Half-Life and UT mods that have been developed by a spotty kid in a weekend) - it's a budget re-release with little thought or effort put into it - it's mildly amusing for maybe half-an-hour but when there are other titles in the market of such superior calibre it's hard to look at Novalogic's latest and do anything other than point and stare.

If this sounds like your kind of thing then try Operation Flashpoint instead - it comes highly recommended. The upcoming Conflict: Desert Storm is also shaping up excellently, albeit with a more arcadey feel. Even the next Delta Force game - the brilliant-looking Black Hawk Down, looks like it's going to be a contender, although whether anyone who buys Task Force Dagger will be willing to give the series another chance in the near future remains to be seen.