Delta Force 10th Anniversary Collection (PC)

When Delta Force was originally released in 1998, it signified a new breed of first person shooter games. Up until then, FPS games for the most part had been fast-paced blast-a-thons which rewarded quick reflexes and quicker trigger fingers. However, Delta Force was one of the first FPS games to emphasize using tactics, stealth, and planning to succeed. You are a member of a real-life military unit, taking part in realistically styled military operations. You don’t find guns and ammo conveniently laying around the area, you pick a loadout during the mission briefing and hope that it’s adequate. There are no armor pickups or medical kits waiting to magically restore you to full health when you run over them. Instead, you character takes one or two hits, then they go down for the count.

You aren’t a near-superhuman one man army shooting up thousands of demons, aliens, or whatever else, you are simply a cog in a machine, and you’d better be a well oiled cog, because know what they say about a chain only being as strong as its weakest link and how there’s no I in team.. Players who approach this game like Doom or Duke Nukem need not expect to last long. Later games in the series (including Black Hawk Down, the one based on the movie that was based on the novel that was based on a real-life U.N. Humanitarian operation in Somalia) featured more complex missions, a greater variety of weapons, and mission editors, but the series remains to this day a thinking man’s FPS. In the spirit of many other computer game series as of late, Novalogic has wrapped the series up into one $20 package. You get every Delta Force title and expansion, (with the exception of 2005’s Delta Force Extreme), strategy guides, and a Black Hawk Down soundtrack CD. If you search on the internet, there is a community which still heavily supports the series, creating everything from tournaments to new maps and scenarios. Fans of tactical shooters such as Socom, Rainbow Six, and Ghost Recon should add this to their collection, as Delta Force can be considered a spiritual predecessor to all of them. By the way long time fans of the series should get ready for Angel Falls and Delta Force Xtreme 2, both of which due out this year.