Black Hawk Down Mission 1 Irene: How to Start

Irene is the campaign’s opening mission and its gentlest: a daytime insertion that gives you room to learn how the campaign handles before the later chapters take the brakes off. Daylight is the detail that matters most — you can read the ground, spot threats at distance, and plan moves instead of reacting to them.

Treat this mission as the setup chapter. The habits you build here carry through all seven missions.

Work the daylight

Good visibility is a resource, and Irene hands it to you for free:

• Scan before you move. Look down the street or corridor before crossing it. In daylight you can count threats and pick the lane with the least resistance.
• Move in bounds. Short runs between covered positions beat long dashes. The campaign’s pressure punishes open-ground movement more than slow progress.
• Stay within support range. In co-op, keep your squad inside the distance where a teammate can reach you. Isolation is what converts a manageable fight into a wipe.

Learn the squad controls

This is the mission to experiment with squad commands. Ordering teammates to hold, move, or focus a target is faster and safer than doing everything yourself, and the later protection and defense missions assume you can split attention between your own movement and your squad’s positioning. If a command behaves differently than you expect, verify its binding before blaming the mission — the campaign’s control hints cover the basics, and a rebind is the usual cause.

Checkpoint discipline

Campaign missions progress through objectives, and Irene is the safest place to learn how the campaign handles progress between phases. Where exactly the mission checkpoints — and what carries over if your squad wipes — is worth confirming in-game rather than assuming. Learn it here, on the mission with the lowest stakes.

Configuration notes

Irene is the cheapest mission in the campaign to run. A daylight scene with short draw distances stresses hardware far less than the night and crowd-heavy chapters that follow. The official PC floor sits at a GTX 1060-class card or higher, and the mobile floor is Snapdragon 865-class or iPhone 11 and above — if your machine clears those, this mission gives you no trouble. Full details live on the requirements page.

On a phone, this is the right mission to calibrate touch controls before the night chapter arrives; the mobile campaign guide covers the layout work.

What to take into Mission 2

Irene teaches spacing, sightlines, and squad handling. The next mission keeps the daylight but adds wounded teammates you have to move, which turns every fight into a logistics problem. Arrive with clean habits — bounds, support range, scanning — and the difficulty step feels small. The campaign overview has the full seven-mission map.