Review: Day of Defeat

DAY OF DEFEAT

Platform: PC
Developer: Valve
Publisher: Activision
Players: 1 (+ online play)

Before you pass this along as just another World War II first person shooter, think about Half Life. Think about Counter-Strike. Got those pictures in your head? Well then you’ve got a good idea on how Day of Defeat (DOD) looks, feels and plays. DOD actually premiered a little over two years ago (2001) as a free modification to Half Life, a ground breaking PC game released in 1998 with an easy-to-create mod system. The Half Life engine spawned a few other mods as well, like Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, Gunman Chronicles and quite a few others.

The initial look of DOD will probably deter the hard-on, maxed out graphics geeks, as the backgrounds are… dated, to say the least. It’s not awful or anything; it still blows away those weak ass, $9.99 FPS’s I see for sale by the cash register in computer stores, but it’s also not Battlefield 1942 (BF1942) graphics either. The sky is… sky like. There are mist and rain effects, but they’re kinda hokey. The bonus of DOD’s paltry graphics means it’s a blast to go thru without any lag on most systems, something that’s totally refreshing.

Turn up your hearing aid, pops, because the sound in this game is excellent. I ran this game on a simple two speaker + subwoofer combo, and the explosions rocked my office. I enjoyed the sound more then BF1942 (not to drive that comparison into the ground, but hey, it’s a top of the line WWII FPS).

Overall, gameplay is quite fun. The respawn times, at most, are 10 seconds are so (which BF1942 makes SO frustrating, with wait times occasionally going past the 25 second mark). Single player is cool, and the AI was decent (way better then BF1942, but can still be totally random with accuracy), but what I really enjoyed was the multiplayer. There were quite a few servers up and running, although not nearly as many as Counter-strike, but hey.