The Battlefield series is a classic for a reason. Battlefield multiplayer has always been its strongest element, even when DICE squandered built-in potential or fumbled something or other seemingly unnecessarily. For as old as it is, however, it never really had any proper competition.

Delta Force: Hawk Ops may be a bit of a silly title, but spend just a few minutes with it and you’ll see just how serious it is at taking on Battlefield. After a bit of a delay, the game’s alpha test kicked off in the West this week, allowing players access to a subset of modes, maps, vehicles and operators.

Let’s get this out of the way quickly: this is really Battlefield 2042 in all but name. It’s going for that specific look to the point it’s hard to tell the two apart just by casually glancing at them. The menus, HUD design/elements, icons, and even some of the lighting quirks are nigh identical. Even one of the alpha maps bears a surprising resemblance to a certain classic Bad Company 2 map (which itself inspired a recent BF2042 map).

It’s quite shameless, but when you actually play it, you’ll realise that developer Team Jade has been more successful at copying the aesthetics than the mechanics and feel of BF2042. What it did do very well, however, was create a really close approximation of the general Battlefield vibe.

Hawk Ops multiplayer delivers combined arms action. Infantry fights alongside air, sea and land vehicles. Some buildings are destructible. There’s a class system. There are Battlefield 2042-style Operators, and so on. The game certainly is going for it.

But while the moment-to-moment feels like Battlefield at a high level, the micro and macro struggle to match DICE’s design. Gunplay in Hawk Ops is inspired more by Call of Duty than it is Battlefield. Weapons kick wildly and their sights bounce around, but it feels arbitrary rather than a representation of their heft and power. You can tell the visual recoil is exaggerated, and it comes across like it’s pretending to be something that isn’t in an attempt to straddle the authentic and arcadey line.

Movement likewise has its roots in tactical shooters and Call of Duty clones. It often feels floaty, lacking the speed and precision of the recent CoDs or even BF2042. Animations just can’t keep up with the pace of combat, and multiple actions cannot be performed while running. You can lean in Hawk Ops, which further pulls it towards the more realistic side of things, but the pace of the action encourages you to treat it like more of an arcade shooter.

This anachronism is evident elsewhere, too, such as with the game’s vehicles. Hawk Ops positions them as precision tools intended to fill certain roles, but they’re armoured killing machines that stop on a dime and don’t quite respect the laws of physics. It’s a bit silly.

A lot of decisions seem to have been made as a response to problems other games faced, and not necessarily ones in Hawk Ops itself. For instance, enemy soldiers are incredibly easy to see – sometimes even through smoke. Air vehicles, in particular, can quickly and easily identify clustered enemies from a distance, which makes them feel like CoD killstreaks.

Recent Battlefield games have famously had problems with player visibility, and Hawk Ops’ every-player-has-a-light-above-them solution seems like it functions exactly like Battlefield 2042’s, which I found a little unusual given how naturally brighter the former’s maps are. It seems like someone copied a recipe and didn’t quite understand that some ingredients are intended to be substitutes if you don’t have what the recipe calls for.

All of those misgivings aside, Hawk Ops is often very successful at fooling you into thinking it’s a lost Battlefield game. The alpha test doesn’t have the classic Conquest mode, but it does have an attack/defend mode that’s basically Breakthrough. Classes do exist, but the limitations on who can use what seem unclear.

Typically, Battlefield games limit certain weapon types to some classes. This isn’t always true in Hawk Ops, and I found that certain weapons within, say the assault rifle category, are locked to some classes. It’s not clear if that’s a bug or intended design, but it never made much sense.

And yes, underneath the class system exist Operators – BF2042 Specialists, basically. They’re characters with unique personalities, looks and such, but they each also have a piece of kit. Just like I felt about BF2042’s heroes, I could do without them here, too. There aren’t many of them in this test, and they all appear to more or less carry equipment that could otherwise exist without them (and have in past Battlefield games), so that at least tells me they’re not going to be whacky.

Because this test is limited, I ran into a lot of AI bots. That is fine, of course, but Hawk Ops does not expose them as such. In fact, you’ll often see that they have normal names – including some with ‘TTV’ at the end to signal they’re Twitch streamers! While bots can be necessary to keep servers full, I don’t think obfuscating their nature does anyone any good.

The alpha ran pretty well on my PC (7800X3D/RTX 4080), and certainly better than Battlefield 2042. It had consistent framerates in 100fps+ at 4K. Part of that can be attributed to the game’s limited destruction and slightly lower player count. Destruction is another element that feels artificial; and not quite as dynamic as you may be used to in Battlefield. Almost like it’s predetermined; where walls are fair game but palm trees and light poles often aren’t.

Outside of some bizarre omissions, like not being able to edit your loadout mid-match, Hawk Ops offers a compelling alternative to Battlefield. It’s not going to replace it, but for the low price of $0, I don’t think anyone could say no to it.

Delta Force: Hawk Ops is a free-to-play, first-person shooter developed by Team Jade and published by Timi Studio Group. It’s set for release sometime this year on PC, consoles and mobile.