The big flaw of Delta Force II is the terrain engine. Novalogic chose their Voxel Space 32 engine, a 32-bit voxel powered system, to draw the game's terrain. Voxels are points in space that have a x, y and z coordinate as well as a color and transparency level. The engine also can use 3D polygon acceleration to draw polygon based parts of the game, such as buildings, as long as your 3D card supports 32-bit color (no Voodoo3 acceleration, sorry). The voxel engine enables a lot of things, but it also makes things just plain ugly. It makes the grass you can hide in possible, but it also makes the grass thick and blocky. It makes the huge sniping distances possible, a polygon based game would choke with that much stuff on screen, but it also makes enemies at even moderate distances look pixilated and squarish like the blockheads from Gumby. Unfortunately, the graphics engine not only makes things ugly, it also makes play difficult. It's hard to see your enemies from any sort of distance, so you often have to find enemies by following the path of their tracers hitting near you, even when they're square in your field of view. The Voxel Space 32 engine is the fatal flaw of Delta Force II because it makes the excellent level and game design useless by not letting you see what you're trying to shoot at.
Before we played Delta Force II, we kept hearing how the multi-player is what really makes the game great. When we heard that games could have up to 50 players and that there would be a wide variety of multi-player modes that went beyond capture the flag, we waxed our router in anticipation. Unfortunately, the real thing turned out to be a let down. We congratulate Novalogic for including an in-game tracker, but it lacks the ability to get your ping time with various hosts so you never know if a game is going to have lag. And while some servers were set to have up to 50 players, we experienced what looked like terrible lag on every server tried, whether they had 15 or 50 players, though nobody else was commenting on it. We expect they were just used to the poor net play since we were not experiencing lag with any other game on our test machine that uses DSL and usually has a super low ping.
