Dagger Directive is a semi sequel to classic Delta Force, and one of 2025's best

Certain characteristics of Dagger Directive might convince you that it's a milsim shooter in the vein of Ground Branch or Arma. Bullets are affected by distance and velocity. Both you and your enemies will die if you're hit even once. Weapons are expansively customizable and, especially without suppressors, plausibly, realistically loud. But this is something else. So far, the boomer shooter trend has been primarily built on our collective memories of Doom, Quake, and Half-Life. Dagger Directive, published by old-school PC icon Microprose, brings Novalogic's Delta Force, the original Rainbow Six, and 2001's Ghost Recon into the inspiration pool. But even then, it's more than just a tribute act.

You choose a mission, you choose the time of day that you would like to begin that mission, and then you build a loadout. There's no leveling up and nothing to unlock – you're an elite special forces operative, working for the eponymous Dagger Directive, and essentially every gun and attachment you can imagine is available from the start. Levels are open and long form, potentially lasting an hour or more each. Once you exit the helicopter, it's up to you how to proceed. Maybe you want to go slow and low, climb onto a ridge and neutralize every enemy in the base using a suppressed rifle and a range finder. Alternatively, take an M203, a SAW, and some claymores, and lure the opposing force into a killzone. Or use an MP5 and go from building to building.

But remember, if you get hit once – and it really is once – you're dead. Thankfully, you can save at any time. That means the intensity stays high (there's this extremely nerve-racking visual effect whenever you're being shot at, and developer Arcane Alpacas has nailed the sounds of bullets bouncing off of concrete and earth), but the frustration factor remains low.

It also means that you can experiment with and vary your approach. The efficient, methodical style – establishing a sniper's roost, flipping on the NVGs, zeroing your scope with the plus and minus keys – is thrilling for a while, but if you want to drop the stealth and go close quarters, you can. Compared to the stop-start staccato of hardcore milsim shooters or the one-speed ferocity of run-and-gunners, Dagger Directive is an FPS game with a variant rhythm.

Its greatest achievement, however, is in its visual design. Partly, Dagger Directive is an affectionate aesthetical homage to the squad shooters of the late 90s and early 00s. Character and vehicle models are blocky, the terrain textures are fuzzy, and the skybox is low and detectably cuboid. Videogames should look like videogames. The contemporary push for ultra fidelity and fetishistic detail homogenizes the whole form and denies games their distinctive visual identity. 27 years since the original Delta Force, and Dagger Directive is a celebration of, and monument to, what I'd call the best era for videogame graphics.

But it's more than that. I'm hesitant to write this because it risks sounding like a complaint or a criticism, especially today, when marketing has made us expect focus-group polish and total verisimilitude. However, I mean it with the greatest praise and admiration – and as a recommendation – when I say that Dagger Directive looks cheap. In 1998, these would be high-level visuals. In 2025, what they create is a profound sense of un-glamor. When you shoot a guy in Dagger Directive, and there's the little cloud of pink mist, and he unceremoniously folds onto the floor, it feels cold and nasty.

There's no style here. There are no airs. A lot of what you're doing in this game is ugly in the moral sense – Dagger Directive isn't didactic or excoriating, but you are playing as an off-the-books black-ops soldier, doing the very wettest wetwork, and so there's this great harmony between the nastiness and squalor of your missions and the extreme crudeness of the visual design. It's combat without class; paradoxically, Dagger Directive's visual non-fidelity makes it feel more real.

Dagger Directive has just been released via Steam Early Access. You can already play 15 full missions, either solo or in co-op, and of all the user reviews posted so far, 90% are positive. If you want to give this one a go, it's $15.99 / £13.40 right now, thanks to a 20% introductory discount. Just head here.

Otherwise, you might want to play some of the best war games, or maybe the best co-op games available on PC.

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