Delta Force: Black Hawk Down
TiMi Studio Group · Shooter, Action
Overview
The BLACK HAWK DOWN co-op campaign is a faithful reboot of the classic 2001 movie and a heartfelt love letter to fans of the original 2003 Delta Force: Black Hawk Down, breathing new life into those legendary stories and moments.
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In this thrilling free-to-play campaign, step into the boots of an elite Delta Force operator and relive one of the most iconic military operations, where a straightforward capture operation turns into an impossible extraction.
From the game's Steam store page.
THE GAMEQ VERDICT3,022 reviews analyzed
What players are actually saying
1. Summary
Delta Force: Black Hawk Down is a free campaign DLC for Delta Force that retells the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, built around scenes, music and dialogue from the 2001 film. Its Steam reviews lean clearly negative, with 39% recommending it. More than half arrived in launch week, when 35.5% were positive, and reviews written after the first fortnight are kinder, at 45%. Technical trouble comes up most. 23% of reviews talk about performance, mostly stutter and low frame rates, and some blame the way the campaign opens as a second program while Delta Force keeps running in the background. Another 10% report crashes or loading screens that never finish.
Players who got it running with three friends describe a slow, punishing co-op campaign set in a convincing Mogadishu, and fans of the film enjoy seeing its scenes recreated. The look and atmosphere draw compliments in negative reviews too. Solo play draws much of the design criticism: there are no AI squadmates, and ammo and bandages can't be resupplied. Reviewers also object to the lack of checkpoints and to enemy snipers and RPG gunners who seem to see players through walls. Difficulty comes up about as often in positive reviews as in negative ones, as realism to some and unfair design to others.
2. What keeps coming up
What players praise
Mogadishu looks and sounds the partHigh
Reviewers point to the dusty streets and dense smoke, the market district and the crash sites, and one liked a night mission that is actually dark. 12% of reviews talk about the graphics, the atmosphere or how immersive it feels. One wrote: "Sound design is really good and immersive. I feel like I'm actually in Bakaara market." Another positive review says "the real win here is in the atmosphere, it nails the feeling of being overwhelmed, outnumbered and deep in hostile territory."
Half of the reviews that compliment the look or atmosphere still recommend against the DLC, and some put both halves in one line: "Aesthetically incredible, unquestionably unplayable." About 1% find the image blurry, grainy or smeared, and some of them blame the Unreal Engine 5 upscaling and anti-aliasing.
Best with a coordinated squadHigh
Positive reviewers describe the support player handing out ammo, the medic passing bandages, covering each other's angles, reviving downed teammates and finally beating the last mission after dozens of tries. Friends, a squad or teamwork come up in 16% of positive reviews, and 9% of positive reviews frame the campaign as something to play with friends or a full squad. One player recalls "doing the mogadishu mile with your friend for the 10th time at 3 AM", and another started without expectations and "ended up meeting three guys who I now consider brothers in arms".
Some make it a condition. "I ONLY RECOMMEND THIS DLC FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVE 3 OTHER FRIENDS TO PLAY THIS WITH," one reviewer wrote, and another rated it "with friends 8/10 but with randoms prepare to yank your hair out".
A playable version of the 2001 filmMedium
Fans of the film like recognizing scenes as they play them: the Irene radio call that starts the raid, the defense of the Super 6-4 crash site, the convoy, the Mogadishu Mile run to the stadium and the ending song. 8% of reviews bring up the movie, its cutscenes or its soundtrack. One says the "cutscenes are 100% replica of that movie", and another noticed "they made it so accurate to the movie that they got the wrong details from the movie right".
Under 1% dislike how much is lifted from the film. They say the campaign reuses its footage and lines instead of telling its own story ("the team blatantly ripped out entire chunks of dialogue from the movie"), and a few call the new voice acting stiff.
Weapons that feel rightLow
"Guns have proper recoil, weight, and accuracy differences, making each weapon feel unique," one reviewer wrote. About 1% single out the gunplay, praising enemies that drop after one or two well-placed shots and turn-of-the-century gear such as the M16A2. A few others say their hits don't always register.
Where players are split
Hardcore difficulty: realism or unfair designHigh
17% of reviews bring up the difficulty, about as often in positive reviews (18%) as in negative ones (16%). Defenders say one life, scarce supplies and two-shot kills are the point of a campaign about a battle that went badly wrong ("It's HARD! And it's meant to be!!!"). They compare it with Ready or Not, Six Days in Fallujah, Arma and Dark Souls, and 6% of positive reviews wave off the critics as a skill issue, telling them to "git gud" or buy a better PC.
Critics separate hard from unfair: "This is not a hard game. It's unfair." One recurring charge is that enemies appear in the same places on every attempt, so progress comes from memorizing spawns. "The only way to complete some of the missions is to memorize the spawn points of enemy AI to the point you do everything on muscle memory," one reviewer wrote. There is no difficulty setting, and 2% ask for one outright. Some players who finished the campaign hold both views, calling it rewarding while still asking for checkpoints and a solo balance pass.
Whether being free excuses itHigh
Being free decides the vote for some. "For free its an awesome game," one player wrote, and another said "I wouldn't have paid for it, at least not in this state." The price comes up in 12% of reviews: 17% of positive reviews and 9% of negative ones. Other reviewers say being free changes nothing: "It's free, and the cost is still too high." Some negative reviewers take the price as a sign the campaign shipped unfinished, and several reviewers say they would have paid for a more polished version with a proper single-player mode.
Slow movement and short staminaMedium
Reviews that bring up movement describe a campaign much slower than Delta Force's multiplayer, with a stamina bar that empties after a few seconds of sprinting and leg wounds that slow you further. 6% of positive reviews praise that slow, tactical style: clearing rooms carefully, moving cover to cover. "I actually really enjoyed the slow movement and the unforgiving shots enemies take at you," one wrote.
3% of negative reviews complain about the same slowness. "You can sprint for 5 seconds and then you lumber like a drunk trying to get to the bathroom at 4am," one wrote, and another said that despite playing elite soldiers "you move like a fridge on roller-skates". Several tie it to the missions that make you keep pace with a moving convoy.
Next to the 2003 originalMedium
NovaLogic's 2003 Delta Force: Black Hawk Down comes up in 5% of reviews. Nostalgic players welcome the scarce resources ("Glad to see no health regen and limited ammo once again.") and the setting, and one mentions the music in the character select menu. Others hold the comparison against the new campaign. They point out that the original was a single-player campaign with more missions, ammo pickups, limited saves and AI squadmates, and that this version follows the film instead. One wrote: "The only single good point this DLC has is that it made me reinstall the OG BHD game and play it again."
Length and replay valueLow
The campaign has seven missions, and estimates of its length depend on how often a squad fails. A group that plays well says it "takes less than 3 hours to complete", while others report five to seven hours including restarts. Several see little reason to play it twice: "good experience for ONE RUN only." Some positive reviews ask for more operations in the same style.
What frustrates players
Poor performance and a second game clientHigh
23% of reviews raise performance, and 74% of those are negative reviews. Reviewers describe frame rates far below the multiplayer modes on the same PC, stutter when entering new areas, CPU usage at or near 100%, input lag, and a dependence on upscaling and frame generation to reach playable rates. 3% of reviews blame the setup: starting a mission opens a separate Unreal Engine 5 program while the Unreal Engine 4 Delta Force client stays open behind it. One of the most upvoted reviews reads, in full: "Separated game client, forces the original delta force exe to run in the background soaking up performance and making the DLC a stuttery mess. Can't aim as it just jitters everywhere. Awful." Another says it "runs at half the framerate of the base game".
The reports include expensive hardware such as RTX 3090 and 4090 cards. 3% of reviews say it ran fine, often listing high-end parts ("FPS counter is steady in the 170s+"), and a few advise lowering the campaign's own graphics preset, which starts high and ignores the multiplayer settings. Talk of performance thinned over time without going away: 27% of reviews from the first fortnight raise performance, against 15% of those written from September 2025 on, and as late as August 2026 a player wrote "I've had it down to 4 fps at one point".
Built for four players, harsh for oneHigh
At launch the campaign was a co-op mode for up to four players with no AI squadmates. You could start a mission alone, but enemy numbers and supplies stayed tuned for a squad, and the class abilities that hand out ammo and bandages only work on other players. 14% of reviews bring up solo play or single player, and 70% of those reviews recommend against the DLC. Some had expected a single-player campaign like the 2003 game: "This is not a single-player game." Another asks for "an offline mode and easier difficulty when you're playing solo."
A dedicated solo option, Fighting Alone, was added by late May 2025. The few reviews that discuss it say it removed some enemies but still left no AI squad, checkpoints or resupply; one calls it "just the same crap but with a few hand picked AI removed". A minority did finish solo, which earns a badge, and enjoyed the challenge. Mentions of solo play fell from 17% of launch-fortnight reviews to 8% of reviews written from September 2025 on.
Enemy AI that sees through walls, allies that barely helpHigh
The same specifics recur: enemies firing at players behind walls and closed doors, snipers that hit the moment you peek, RPG gunners firing in quick volleys, enemies appearing in rooms the squad just cleared or right behind it, and melee kicks that knock a player down in one hit. 13% of reviews raise the enemy or friendly AI, the snipers, the RPG gunners or enemy spawns, and 79% of those are negative reviews. "The AI seems to have omniscient awareness of your position at all times," wrote a squad of three who describe themselves as Arma, Ground Branch and Tarkov veterans. Friendly Rangers and convoy gunners get the opposite complaint ("the AI on your team is SO useless"). A few defenders say the swarming matches what the real battle was like.
Crashes, endless loading and install loopsHigh
"I'm pretty sure i would have grandchildren before i get past the 83% loading mark," one player wrote. 10% of reviews report crashes, freezes, loading screens stuck at a fixed point such as 83% or 87%, "waiting for match" loops, or a campaign that never starts. Some describe blue screens, whole-PC freezes and voice chat dropping in Discord while the campaign runs. Separately, about 1% hit an install loop in which Steam shows the DLC installed while the game asks for it again: "i try to download it from steam and it just launches the game." A handful were blocked by an outdated-driver warning on up-to-date cards ("It tells me my graphics drivers are outdated when I updated them 2 mins before playing."). These reports were most common at launch, and 6% of reviews from September 2025 on still mention crashes or loading problems.
No way to resupply ammo or bandagesHigh
Each mission starts with a fixed stock of ammo, bandages and grenades. The maps have no crates, weapons can't be taken from fallen enemies or allies, and the support and medic classes share from their own stock but can't refill themselves. 10% of reviews talk about ammo or resupply, two-thirds of them negative reviews. "let us pick up one of the thousands of AK's on the ground," one reviewer wrote, and a solo player found that "it turns out you cant replenish your ammo in solo in any way". Launch-era reviews also note there was no melee even though enemies could kick you down: "There is no melee, so when your pathetic amount of ammo runs dry, you are screwed." Reviews from mid-2025 on mention a knife, and complaints about having no melee become rare after that.
Defenders say scarcity is the point and advise single-shot fire and a dedicated support player. One positive review names it as its only problem: "The only problem I have is running out of ammo cause you are required to have at least one person playing support".
Matchmaking and talking to randomsMedium
Quick match can't target a mission, so players who want a particular chapter keep landing in the wrong one ("It's really just annoying that you can't select which mission to join to."). 6% of reviews mention matchmaking, lobbies or random teammates. Nobody can join a session in progress or replace a player who leaves, some lobbies stall on AFK players, and there is no text chat, ping or compass to coordinate with strangers: "Push-to-talk is the only way how you can communicate with team." A couple of later reviews found the lobbies empty: "I want to play this campaign so bad but no players :<"
No checkpoints, and slow retriesMedium
A squad wipe sends everyone back through the lobby, loadout screen, loading and opening cutscene of a mission that can run 20 minutes or more. 5.5% of reviews raise checkpoints or having to restart from scratch. "I lagged off a balcony and had to restart 40 minutes of gameplay which is really annoying," one player wrote, and another asked "Why would you ever make a game with 20-30 minute missions and no checkpoints". A few like the stakes ("The no checkpoints isn't too bad, if you fail you'll do better next run"). Unlike most complaints this one did not fade: it appears in 5% of launch-fortnight reviews and 6% of later ones.
The convoy escort and the final missionMedium
4% of reviews single out particular missions. In the second mission the convoy keeps driving into RPG fire while the squad tries to clear the rooftops ahead of it, and a single rocket can destroy a vehicle. One player called it "one of the worst designed escort missions I've ever played in a video game", and a positive review from a self-described former soldier suggested "Being able to tell the drivers in mission 2 to stop or back the hell up would be nice." The final mission asks the squad to keep pace with a convoy under mortar, sniper and RPG fire, with a timer for falling behind. Duos and trios describe dozens of failed attempts, and some gave up. Some squads that beat it describe the win as a real accomplishment ("the mission felt like a Dark Souls Boss").
No controller support in the campaignMedium
Delta Force's multiplayer modes support controllers and the campaign does not. 2% of all reviews raise controller support, but the complaint is concentrated in later reviews: 8.5% of those written from August 2025 on, which makes it one of the most frequent complaints of that period. "Main game has controller support but this add-on doesnt," one reviewer wrote, and another, a year after launch: "dude this DLC came out a year ago and is completely unplayable with controller".
Audio bugs and missing basicsLow
Enemy gunfire can be muffled or missing ("People are within arms length and yet their gunshots sound like they are 4 buildings away."), and some say the sound lags behind the action. Keybinds and graphics settings don't carry over from the multiplayer, and "you cannot change graphic setting from main menu". Some subtitles and the end-of-mission score screen show untranslated Chinese text, and on every retry the mission intro has to be skipped again. Each of these comes up in under 3% of reviews.
The size of the downloadLow
2.5% of reviews object to installing the full Delta Force client, which they put at roughly 100 GB or more, to reach a campaign of a few hours that itself takes another 20 to 30 GB. "Let us download the campaign without having to download the full game," one wrote.
Anti-cheat and bansLow
Under 1% of reviews object to running Delta Force's kernel-level anti-cheat for a co-op campaign. Some report its services staying behind after uninstalling ("After uninstalling the game, I found that it continued to leave behind at least one kernel-level file on my system."), and a few say they were flagged or banned right after installing.
Reviews that are really about Delta ForceLow
A small number of reviews score the whole game: cheaters in the Operations mode, its matchmaking, or the price of the Black Hawk Down skin bundle in the store. One draws the line itself: "The main game has a lot of cheaters and virtually no moderation. BUT.... Black Hawk Down is great!" Those complaints belong to Delta Force's own verdict and don't shape this one.
3. The player conversation
Some reviewers say the campaign was their only reason to install Delta Force or that they had waited years for it, often because they love the film or grew up with the 2003 game, and most of them are disappointed. Positive reviewers argue back, calling critics unskilled or impatient or telling them to get a better PC, and some open by questioning the score ("I don't get the negative reviews."). Detailed reviews are harsher than the headline figure: reviews of 12 characters or fewer, mostly "good" or "nice", are 69% positive, while reviews of 100 characters or more are 34% positive.
Friends and squads come up about twice as often in positive reviews as in negative ones, and positive reviews more often compare the campaign with slow tactical shooters such as Ready or Not or Six Days in Fallujah; a few of them suggest the critics expected the multiplayer's pace. Negative reviews bring up solo play more often (16% against 11% of positive reviews) and performance nearly twice as often (28% against 15%). Praise for the presentation and setting comes from both sides.
Launch-fortnight reviews talk most about performance, then difficulty and solo play. Reviews from April and May 2025 were the first months above half, at 52% positive. The rest of 2025 averaged 46%, and reviews from 2026 came in at 42%. In those later reviews solo, performance and melee complaints take up less space and missing controller support takes up more, a couple of reviewers report empty lobbies, and checkpoint complaints hold steady.
4. What the developers could do
- Run the campaign in one client and fix its performance. 23% of reviews raise performance, three quarters of them negative reviews, and some trace the stutter and CPU load to the second program that opens while Delta Force keeps running behind it.
- Fix launch and loading failures. 10% of reviews report crashes, loading screens frozen at 83% or 87% or endless "waiting for match" screens, and about 1% are stuck in an install loop where Steam and the game disagree about whether the DLC is installed.
- Make solo play work with AI squadmates and solo-scaled missions. 14% of reviews bring up solo play, and 70% of those reviews are negative; the few that discuss Fighting Alone say it still lacks a squad and a way to resupply.
- Stop enemies firing through walls and appearing behind cleared rooms. 13% of reviews raise the enemy or friendly AI, snipers, RPG gunners or spawns, and 79% of those are negative reviews; players also want allies who can hit something and a convoy that can be told to wait.
- Let players resupply. 10% of reviews talk about ammo, two-thirds of them negative reviews, and they ask for weapon pickups, ammo and bandage crates, or support and medic abilities that also work on yourself.
- Add mid-mission checkpoints and a quick retry. 5.5% of reviews raise the lack of checkpoints or the slow restart, and that complaint held steady across every period while most other complaints shrank.
- Let quick match target a mission and add basic squad communication. 6% of reviews raise matchmaking, describing joins into the wrong chapter, no join-in-progress, AFK players and no text chat, ping or compass.
- Bring the multiplayer's controller support to the campaign. It is one of the most frequent complaints in reviews written from August 2025 on, raised in 8.5% of them.






