Delta Force: Task Force Dagger

We've never totally understood the popularity of Delta Force as a single-player experience. While the perpetual production line of Sim games is bought by casual gamers to play between bouts of Solitaire, the Delta Force series presumably has its fanbase among lovers of hardcore sim shooters.

And they really should be more discerning. It might have moved on from the eye-grating voxels of previous instalments (although the terrain is still rendered that way), but the 3D engine -already piss-poor 18 months ago - can only be described as disgraceful. And the gameplay certainly doesn't make up for it.

It's a vacuous succession of base infiltration missions against the most idiotic enemies you'll ever encounter.

Enduring Nausea

If you've never sampled the lack of delights that is a Delta Force single-player game, it's best described as a poor man's Project IGI. And Task Force Dagger is nothing less than an atrocious and near criminal expansion pack for DF: Land Warrior, designed to cash-in on the recent war in Afghanistan.

However, while the Al and general feel of TFD have nothing to do with reality, the selection of accurately recreated weapons do manage to save it from total catastrophe. Everything from the animations to the terrain and level design screams cardboard shoddiness.

Where Ghost Recon's sand-filled add-on pack Desert Siege turned dunes into lush battlefields, Task Force Dagger offers you endless plateaus of textureless beige. But you really have to see it in action to realise how bad it looks. Also the third-person view is less than useless.

Multiple Aims

As ever, it's the multiplayer side of things that helps to warrant you spending your money. So long as you're playing on a server filled with players. Otherwise you just end up wandenng for ages through vast areas of nothingness, before spotting an enemy 12 sandbanks away and falling dead to the floor if you don't hit them first.

Targetting is made harder and more realistic by weather conditions and accurate bullet physics, meaning you can't simply point at an enemy half a mile away and expect to hit them first time, which adds considerably to the challenge of the game.

Sadly though, the multiplayer games don't detract from the fact that this is simply exploiting a conflict that is still far too fresh in people's memories to be turned into any form of entertainment. It also falls short in the graphics and Al department, which are appalling. The forthcoming Delta Force: Black Hawk Down may deserve to be as successful as past chapters in the series, but if this tops the charts they'll be boxing camel shit and putting it on the shelves next.