If you love tactical-based gameplay, you’ll love this mode even if it can frustrate. Console players will unfortunately have to play Delta Force Boosting this mode solo as, when I asked the developers during our interview, they said that because of that technical discrepancy (the differences in engines I mentioned earlier and how the game has to launch a separate executable) it is a challenge to bring cooperative functionality to consoles at this time.

I really like Delta Force. When I picked this game up months back, I did so because I was looking for a shooter that would fill my time. I played shooters all my life, some of the more notable ones being Battlefield, Unreal Tournament, Halo, ‘Combat Arms’, ‘War Rock’ (I’m sorry for reminding you of this one), so on and so forth. These are and were my favourite time wasters, but over the last decade I personally found that the shooter genre evolved in a direction that I wasn’t too interested in. Hero shooters, battle royales galore—that goober who walked the Summer Games Fest stage a few months back was “right” about shooters not quite being what they used to be, but he also missed the point so hard their game ended up being unlaunched.

And I bring this up because I’ve been thinking back to that moment on stage, that little gaffe, when I think about why I don’t play shooters much these days. Not just the modern war stuff, mind, but even the ones with cartoony, fantastical universes. Not expecting the industry to evolve is silly, because mechanic and mode offerings today could very likely be a thing of the past a decade from now. Who knows, right? But here’s the thing I ended up really enjoying about Delta Force: it combines much of the newer game modes and progression systems that permeate modern gaming while also digging into what made older shooters fun. There are game types here with player controllers and objectives that differ significantly from the other and yet, despite the many grievances players have expressed regarding cheaters and matchmaking queue times, I’ve never heard anyone actually complain about the game’s balancing. That’s a rare sight, in my eyes.

It might not look like it from a glance, but buy Delta Force Boosting is an ambitious shooter. It plays great across all modes despite some polish issues for the overall experience. But it gets a lot of things right in a shooter that I don’t see in today’s shooters which is why I think this is a damn good game. For free, no less.