These early teething issues go beyond performance, though. The game’s UI on console is… not great, not great at all. The experience just hasn’t been fine tuned on Xbox yet, and I was struggling to get familiar with it as I toiled away with the Extraction mode and online PvP. The game was telling me I needed to make certain loadout preparations before jumping into Extraction — instructions that I could barely read when sat on my couch — and the game just didn’t properly explain how and why I needed to make those preparations. In the end I ignored them and just jumped in anyway.
Once you’re in-game, other niggly issues become apparent. Extraction shooters rely on good audio to keep the experience fair and rewarding, and Delta Force struggles in this regard too. Gunshots are insanely loud, footsteps are hard to gauge, and small environmental cues just become distracting rather than immersive. Some tweaking to the game’s audio wouldn’t go amiss, particularly in this mode.
Over in the more standard PvP offering, which is much closer to the Battlefield 6 experience, the aforementioned performance issues — and some general gameplay shortcomings — let the side down somewhat. Delta Force multiplayer isn’t bad per say (it actually plays more like Battlefield 2042 in some ways), but it just doesn’t feel as good as some of the competition. The gunplay is hit-and-miss depending on the weapon, and there’s a general feeling that the console version needs work to match up to other games – and by some accounts, match up to the PC version as well, which is seemingly in a better state in terms of game feel.
So, the good news here is that most of these Delta Force issues can be tackled, and I do think the game will improve on console over time. The thing is, Battlefield 6 is breathing down its neck with an upcoming October release date – and I just think the EA offering runs rings around it when you compare the beta experience to Delta Force on launch day. Ultimately, we’ll have to wait and see how both of these FPS games fare in the coming months – but playing Delta Force has made me really, really miss the BF6 beta. And that’s a ringing endorsement for what Battlefield Studios is building right now.
