Delta Squad

Delta Squad is a top-down 2D scrolling shooter set in a fantasy world. Players engage in fast-paced action gameplay, controlling their character directly to battle through levels filled with enemies. Developed by Eskema Games and released in 2019, the game is available on multiple platforms including Windows, Macintosh, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch.

Delta Squad: A Forgotten Echo in the Indie Shooter Landscape

In the vast and ever-expanding universe of indie games, countless titles are launched into the digital ether, each hoping to capture a sliver of the market’s attention. Most fade into obscurity, becoming mere footnotes in platform storefronts. Delta Squad, a 2019 top-down shooter from Eskema Games, stands as a poignant case study of this phenomenon—a game that exists, technically, but left almost no discernible mark on the medium, its players, or the industry at large.

Development History & Context

A Studio in the Shadows
Eskema Games, the developer behind Delta Squad, operates with a near-spectral presence in the gaming world. The credits list a small, dedicated team: Alex Perez on programming, Pablo Escribano on 2D art, and Pau Damià Riera on music. This core trio, alongside a group of translators, represents the classic indie development structure—a handful of passionate individuals leveraging accessible tools to create a commercial product. The game was built on the Unity engine, the democratizing workhorse of the modern indie scene, which allowed for rapid development and multi-platform deployment.

The Era of the Indie Deluge
Delta Squad was released on May 29, 2019, a period where digital storefronts like Steam were already saturated with hundreds of new games every week. The barrier to entry was lower than ever, but the barrier to visibility was correspondingly higher. To stand out, a game needed either a groundbreaking hook, impeccable polish, masterful marketing, or a combination of all three. It was into this brutally competitive landscape that Delta Squad was launched, published by a trio of companies known for porting and distributing budget-tier games: Eskema Games itself, Ratalaika Games S.L., and Eastasiasoft Limited. These publishers have extensive catalogs focused on quantity and accessibility across platforms, often specializing in affordable titles for trophy and achievement hunters. This context is crucial to understanding Delta Squad’s place in the market: it was designed as a compact, inexpensive experience for a very specific, undemanding niche.

Narrative & Thematic Deep Dive

The Void of Narrative
Here, the review must confront a stark reality presented by the source material: there is no narrative to analyze. The MobyGames entry lacks any description, official or otherwise. The “Ad Blurb” section is empty. The credits list no writers, narrative designers, or voice actors. The game’s genres are listed simply as “Action” and “Shooter,” with a “Fantasy” setting, but this is a classification, not a story.

This profound absence is, in itself, a telling detail. In an age where even the simplest arcade games often feature a skeletal premise—a hero, a villain, a motivation—Delta Squad appears to offer nothing. There is no “Delta Squad” to speak of, no characters to invest in, no dialogue to critique, and no themes to unravel. The game exists purely at the level of mechanics: you control a cursor, you shoot fantasy-themed enemies. Any narrative or thematic weight is not just light; it is non-existent, making it a pure abstraction of conflict.

Gameplay Mechanics & Systems

The Core Loop: A Functional Skeleton
Based on its classification as a “Top-down” “2D scrolling” “Shooter,” we can extrapolate the essential gameplay. The player likely controls a character or vehicle from an aerial perspective, moving them through linear or semi-linear environments, automatically scrolling or player-directed, dispatching a bestiary of fantasy enemies that pour in from the edges of the screen.

The interface is “Direct Control,” suggesting standard keyboard or joystick movement with aiming and firing mapped to buttons or a second stick. Without critical reviews or player impressions, we must assume the mechanics are functional—they work—but the lack of any discussion or praise suggests they are also utterly unremarkable. There is no mention of innovative systems, deep character progression, customizable loadouts, or strategic depth. The gameplay loop is likely a straightforward cycle: enter arena, clear waves of enemies, collect power-ups or points, repeat.

The Flaw in the Design
The most significant flaw, inferred from its total obscurity, is a likely lack of “juice” or feedback. Great arcade shooters thrive on tactile satisfaction—the screen shake of a powerful blast, the impactful sound design of enemy explosions, the visual spectacle of a dozen foes dissolving simultaneously. Delta Squad‘ silence on these fronts, both literally and figuratively, implies a experience that is mechanically present but sensorially hollow. It is a game that exists to be completed, not to be felt.

World-Building, Art & Sound

A Generic Fantasy Sketch
The visual direction is “2D scrolling,” with art by Pablo Escribano. The “Fantasy” setting suggests a palette of medieval enemies—perhaps goblins, skeletons, or dragons—rendered in a functional but likely simplistic pixel-art or vector style. The world-building is, like the narrative, a void. There are no locations with names, no environmental storytelling, no lore to discover. The “world” is merely a series of backdrops against which the shooting occurs.

The one element that holds promise is the sound. Pau Damià Riera, credited for music, has a history of work on other games. His contribution is the one aspect that might have elevated the experience beyond the mundane. Yet, without any samples or reviews, its quality remains a mystery. Did it provide a driving, energetic score to complement the action? Or was it as forgettable as the rest of the package? The silence is deafening.

Reception & Legacy

The Sound of One Hand Clapping
The reception of Delta Squad can be summarized with a single, powerful statistic: on MobyGames, a database with over 622,000 reviews, Delta Squad has precisely zero. Zero critic reviews. Zero player reviews. It was collected by exactly one user. Its Moby Score is “n/a.”

This is its legacy. It was not panned; it was ignored. It was not a commercial failure; it was a non-event. It did not influence subsequent games because, for all practical purposes, it never happened. Its release across Windows, Mac, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch was not a triumphant multi-platform launch but a quiet, simultaneous posting on five different digital storefronts, where it was swiftly buried under an avalanche of other content.

A Micro-Legacy of Obscurity
Its legacy, then, is meta. Delta Squad serves as a perfect artifact for analyzing the nature of the modern indie game market. It represents the absolute baseline of what constitutes a shipped, commercial video game in the late 2010s: a product that is technically complete, legally available for purchase, but devoid of any cultural or artistic resonance. It is a testament to the fact that it is possible to make a game that checks all the technical boxes—credits, publisher, multi-platform release—while making virtually no impact whatsoever.

Conclusion

Delta Squad is not a bad game. To be bad, it would need to be notable enough to critique. It is, instead, the video game equivalent of a whisper in a hurricane—a product that exemplifies pure, unadulterated obscurity. It is a technically complete entity that lacks soul, innovation, narrative, and, most crucially, an audience.

Its place in video game history is not in the main text but in the appendix; it is a footnote reminding us that for every groundbreaking indie success story, there are thousands of titles like this—perfectly functional, utterly forgettable, and ultimately, archeological curiosities for the most dedicated digital historians. The final verdict on Delta Squad is that it is less a game to be played and more a data point to be considered, a stark monument to the immense challenge of creating something that truly matters in a saturated world.