Delta Force

The most-upvoted review of Delta Force has 10,972 helpful votes and 0.2 hours played. It is not about the guns.

It's about Anti-Cheat Expert, the kernel-level anti-cheat this game installs, and the reviewer's report that it kept running with the game closed, conflicted with Easy Anti-Cheat so other games wouldn't launch, and persisted after uninstallation. Below it sit four more reviews on the same subject with 4,085, 3,870, 2,449 and 2,320 votes — and one at 2,143 votes from a player with 5,793 hours in the game, which is a striking thing to read from someone who has spent eight months of their life inside it.

That's the review this game gets, and it's a shame, because the shooter is good.

The game part

Delta Force is two shooters sharing an armoury. Warfare is large-scale combined-arms combat — vehicles, classes, objectives — and it lands the Battlefield feeling that Battlefield itself struggled to deliver in that period; several reviewers arrived from Battlefield 6's troubled predecessor and stayed. Operations is an extraction mode with operators, gadgets, loot runs, entry codes and armed bosses, closer in shape to ARC Raiders than to Escape from Tarkov's severity.

The gunplay is genuinely good, the weapon customisation is deep, and it looks sharp. All of that is free, on PC, console and mobile with cross-play.

The monetisation deserves specific credit, because I've scored several games harshly for it this year and consistency matters. Across the hundred most-helpful English negatives, "pay to win" appears essentially nowhere. Skins come up eleven times, battle passes five. For a free game from one of the largest publishers on earth, selling cosmetics and collaboration skins — there's a Rainbow Six Siege crossover running as I write — and leaving the guns alone is a defensible arrangement that a lot of premium games don't manage.

What it installs

Now the part that produced those numbers.

The complaint is specific and consistent enough to report carefully. Reviewers describe Anti-Cheat Expert installing kernel-level services — they name them, AntiCheatExpert Service and AntiCheatExpert Protection, under C:\Program Files\AntiCheatExpert — which run whether or not the game is open, and which they say remain after the game is removed. Several publish the command sequence they used to delete the services manually. One reviewer notes that the publisher had previously said leftover kernel files were addressed, and reports finding them anyway.

I can't independently verify what a driver does on someone else's machine, and I'm not going to pretend a review corpus is a forensic audit. What I can report is that this is the most-upvoted and most-repeated criticism the game has, that it comes from players with playtimes ranging from twelve minutes to nearly six thousand hours, and that it spans from launch week in December 2024 through to 2026 without the accounts changing.

Kernel-level anti-cheat is now common — Denuvo Anti-Cheat, Vanguard, EAC all operate there, and ARC Raiders moved to kernel-level in 2026 with far less outcry. The distinction players are drawing here is not "kernel-level exists" but "it runs when I'm not playing, it stops other software working, and removing your game doesn't remove it." That's a reasonable line to draw, and if you're not comfortable with it, this review's recommendation is simply: don't install it.

Cheating anyway

The bitter part is that all of the above is in service of an anti-cheat that players say isn't working. Cheat appears in 79 of the hundred most-helpful English negative reviews. Bans in 31, anti-cheat in 21, hacks in 21. A reviewer with 111 hours, broadly positive about the game, states the problem in one line: it's "ineffective, and 80% of lobbies are rampant with cheaters" — an estimate, not a measurement, but the sentiment is near-universal.

To their credit, Team Jade are visibly fighting it. They publish "G.T.I. Security | Notice of penalties for violations" posts roughly weekly, along with a mid-year security brief that opens by acknowledging players "look at the ban numbers first." That's more transparency than most publishers offer. It hasn't shifted the perception.

Note also what the negative timeline looks like: 24 of the hundred in the launch quarter, then a steady 9 to 16 every quarter since, with no decline. This isn't a launch problem that got fixed.

The numbers behind the badge

The lifetime score is 57.9% across 191,166 reviews, which reads worse than the English experience. English sits at 65.6% of 67,893. Brazilian Portuguese is the outlier in the other direction at 82.2%, Korean 62.7%, Russian 53.5%, and Simplified Chinese — roughly a third of the entire corpus at 59,764 reviews — at just 40.7%.

That's a forty-point spread between the most and least satisfied language cohorts, and the Chinese figure is doing most of the work in dragging the overall badge down. English-speaking readers should calibrate to 65.6%, and to the fact that current sentiment matches it almost exactly: 64 of the last 100 English reviews are positive, at a 29-hour median.

The other number worth noting is the negative corpus's median playtime of 228.8 hours. As with several games in this library, the people complaining loudest are the people who play it most.

The verdict

Delta Force earns a 6.5. The shooter deserves better — as a free product it's more generous, better made and less predatory than it had any obligation to be, and if it were scored purely on what happens between the loading screens it would be comfortably into the 8s.

It isn't scored that way, because a review has to describe what you're agreeing to. What you're agreeing to is a kernel-level driver that its own players say outstays its welcome, in defence of matches that four in five critical reviewers say contain cheaters regardless. The developers are patching weekly and publishing their ban numbers, and after twenty months the sentiment hasn't moved.

Play it if that trade sits fine with you — plenty of people have made it their main game and put hundreds of hours in. Skip it if it doesn't, and don't let "it's free" do the deciding, because the price isn't the only thing you're paying.