When a point is under attack, the icon's frame will flash yellow. In the first-person view, spawn points will show up as unobtrusive colored icons, red for rebels and blue for the Joint Ops team. There will be perimeter rings around bases and King of the Hill strategic points, and the game does a good job of keeping people oriented. You'll get the compass map in the lower left-hand corner with arrows leading from your spot to the objective. The HUD and map design is well done, and should be familiar to those who've played Black Hawk Down. There's still some fairly bright moonlight, but if you keep your head down, you can go a long way to the objective without any hairiness. This limits your field of view, but improves stealth immensely. A great gameplay enhancement here is a fast day-night cycle that requires you to use night vision when things get dark. The maps that stick to ground advancement and combat are much stronger and give Joint Ops a chance to shine. So air approaches are fast but treacherous, and water approaches are similarly challenging because the defender can see you from so far out and peck you to death with emplaced guns, which have infinite ammo. And then there's the Stinger missiles, which typically blow up the chopper in one hit. It would have been great to rappel out instead of having to wait until the chopper was close enough for you to jump. This is not a fault of the game, granted, but I flew directly over hot zones several times, and other pilots took a suicidally long time to land. The enemy will come in with choppers, but the pilot typically simply could not find a good place to land it. A few times I took the job of crawling around in the bush with a sniper rifle and picking these guys off. Still, this doesn't stop players from trickling in along the flanks, but the most they do is harass the spawn point with small-arms fire and the occasional mortar. 50 cals, a few gun emplacements on the beach, and a few snipers and heavy gunners hiding on the ridges and at the edge of the treeline. It's also quite easy to defend a beachhead, with a couple gunboats armed with grenade launchers and. And because the damage modeling is so realistic, it's not uncommon to get all the way over there, crawl around for a few seconds, get shot, and start over back at your base. There will be beachhead spawn points you can capture, but you have to, well, capture them (and hold on to them) to avoid making the long trek.
When you have up to 75 people playing on one side, you're going to want to have a sizeable fleet of gunboats, hovercrafts, choppers, APCs, jeeps, buggies, rafts to get people from Point A to Point B, especially when you're traveling long distances over water-the kind of distance that is just not practical to swim. One hundred and fifty people can play at once on the same map, and the map size and overall stability was solid across the board, although I would have wished for more transport vehicles.
Joint Ops brings us to a near-future Indonesia, but the story and locale aren't too important in an MP design to devote much more than, "This is a Southeast Asian tropical environment." You'll get jungles, semi-urban environments, island chains, and fortress assaults, for the most part, on huge maps that support up to 150 people.
Well, that day has finally come, and this time the action is totally multiplayer, aside from the requisite offline training missions. This was supposed to debut in the expansion pack, Team Sabre, but was pulled late in development, causing many to wonder when Nova would eventually implement the feature in one of their games. Yet even multiplayer had one niggle: no controllable vehicles. Large maps, constant action, and objective-based gameplay with dozens of other gun-toters was pretty nice. In theory, it's the best of both worlds, but multiplayer proved to be the big appeal, as single player suffered from poor AI and some frustrating design decisions.
While Comanche has been, arguably, the most popular franchise, the Delta Force series has been going strong for almost six years now, recently morphing into the Black Hawk Down license and combining the Comanche flight engine. Novalogic has always been known for its military games.