I have a theory – or maybe it's more of a personal belief – that videogames looked their best between 1996 and 2005. Now we have photorealism, immeasurable polygon counts, and cloth physics, but in the old days, games looked like games. They had their own aesthetic. They were unique. With that in mind, and also recalling the halcyon days of Ghost Recon – Desert Siege, Jungle Storm, and so on – meet Dagger Directive, a new tactical FPS just signed by simulation game legend MicroProse that looks like it comes from the year 2000 and plays like a mix of Arma, Operation Flashpoint, and Delta Force. This is the kind of shooter that the PC was made for.
As a member of Task Force Dagger (oh yeah), you and your team embark on a series of increasingly perilous missions to defeat terrorism around the world. In typical strategic Dagger Directive shine is its blocky but fluid visual style – it looks like a classic shooter from 25 years ago, but plays like something modern, and has the mechanical conceits to match.
Maps in Dagger Directive are incredibly large, and you can choose what time of the day you would like to initiate your mission. There's a dynamic day and night cycle, so if it's an especially intricate operation, you need to plan accordingly – you might drop from the helicopter in the early hours of the morning, but don't forget to bring flash suppressors and NVGs for when it gets dark.
Inspired by the best simulation games, every object and projectile in Dagger Directive is also intricately modeled. Bullets drop over distance, and veer off target in response to weather. If you throw a grenade, it won't just explode – it will send individual lumps of shrapnel in every direction, so you need to be in cover when it goes off.
All told, Dagger Directive looks and sounds like an early '00s classic, but has the attention to tactics and detail you might find in modern Battlefield. There's no release date yet, but you can wishlist it on Steam here.
In the meantime, try some of the best old games that can still run on your PC.
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