YMMV / Delta Force

• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: For the most part, the only loadout you'll ever need is the M4 with the Grenade Launcher attachment, a silenced pistol and the extra ammo and body armour secondary loadouts. These will pretty much cover the bases for almost all your needs (The M4 for sniping, explosives, and general close combat, and the silenced pistol for stealth kills). However, if the LAW appears in a mission's default loadout, it's generally a good idea to take it.
• Demonic Spiders: Helicopters. They move fast, making them hard to hit at long ranges with the LAW or grenade launcher, are elevated, giving them an excellent view, and are able to lay down More Dakka, shredding a hapless player into mincemeat in seconds. They're also quite tough; A single LAW will take care of them, if you can make the shot, but it can take at least two grenades or a lot of rounds from the M4 if you miss or didn't pack a LAW in the first place. Mercifully, you generally won't encounter more than one of them per mission.
• First Installment Wins: Of the original games, the first one is the most highly regarded, mostly because the games that followed didn't add a whole lot new to the formula. Of the later games, Black Hawk Down, where the series changed direction, is considered the best of those.
• Genre Turning Point: The game essentially created the whole MilSim genre, becoming the bedrock on which the likes of such games as Operation Flashpoint or Arma were build on, not to mention rest of the Delta Force titles adding later on to the formula.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The penultimate mission in Land Warrior is codenamed Operation Flashpoint.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: One of the major problems with the series is that sequels never really added much to the innovation of the first entry. AI, graphics, and features rarely evolved beyond 1998 levels, so by the time of the Xtreme games, they had been left far behind by competing franchises.
• Scrappy Weapon:
  • The underwater firearms introduced in Delta Force 2 and carried over into Land Warrior have shorter ranges than other firearms. Given that very few situations actually call for their use, coupled with the combat in the games being geared to fighting at longer ranges than traditional first person shooters of the time, these weapons aren't popular amongst players at all, to the point that they don't appear again in subsequent games.
  • Due to problems with Griefers spamming satchel charges and mines to make people lag out from the sheer number of entities the game has to handle, NovaLogic implemented the very clunky Obvious Rule Patch of simply removing their associated objects from the game, rendering those secondaries completely unusable even in single-player. Granted, they weren't terribly useful even when around due to the LAW letting you do the same thing from long range, but it still causes problems with certain missions requiring the use of satchel charges to trigger event flags (though the LAW still works).
• Sequel Difficulty Drop:
  • The Xtreme series, which were generous of checkpoints, players can take multiple hits, and Death Is a Slap on the Wrist.
  • Zigzagged by Land Warrior. Players are more durable, especially with the body armour. And this isn't even taking Pitbull's innate extra toughness into account. The game also adds armouries for field resupplies, weapons with adjustable scopes for even better long range fighting, and, most useful of all, Save Scumming, which alleviates the Checkpoint Starvation of the first two games. To balance out a bit, enemies are now armed with a larger array of weaponry, including grenades and rocket launchers, there's more emphasis on close quarters combat, and some of the later levels especially have hordes of enemies spawn in after certain event flags.
• That One Level:
  • "Blackjack" in the original game requires raiding a village heavily defended by enemy forces in order to secure a bomb. Not only is the mission area absolutely crawling with enemies, but you can scour the village all day and still not find the bomb because it's actually nowhere near the objective marker. The mission briefing does give a hint where to look, but even with the hint it's not obvious... assuming you didn't just skim through the mission briefing or skip it entirely.
  • "Hourglass" in Delta Force 2 involves securing a bomb containing a biological weapon in the middle of an oil refinery. The mission has a stipulation that the refinery cannot be destroyed, as that would release the virus and cause untold casualties. Unfortunately, the refinery is absolutely littered with fuel barrels that explode on being shot, which tend to take the entire refinery with them. One Mook is hiding in a tower surrounded by them. If the player doesn't carefully snipe him, your inept squadmates will end up wiping the place out trying to shoot him when you try to close in on the place. Add to that, the virus is contained within a barrel, making it difficult to find as you have to worry about both not getting shot and not blowing the entire place up around you as you do so.
  • "Operation Prairie Dog" from Land Warrior is a meeting with a contact in a small town that goes horribly wrong. As soon as the player gets anywhere near close enough to the contact, then waves of enemies start coming out of the woodwork in a Zerg Rush. The main objective is to retreat to the extraction point and it's a hard fought battle to get there. And if that weren't enough, upon arrival at the extraction point, the enemy drops a dozen or so paratroopers on the landing site.
• Underused Game Mechanic: The games do have swimming mechanics and even go the extra mile by having conventional firearms unable to fire underwater along with, starting from the second game, specialised weapons for underwater fighting and a rebreather for remaining underwater for long periods of time. However, not a lot of missions have water and fewer still where fighting underwater is a practical option.