"The game that keeps on laming."

Ah. Day of Defeat, my old friend. Through many transitions you have passed, and many interesting innovations you have produced. From the enormous, immersing maps, to the ambient WW2 atmosphere, to the wide array of weaponry at the player’s disposal. You would seem to have everything I could want in an online FPS. This wonderful vision however, is soon crushed, mashed, diced, put in a blender, and ingested by large bacon scented crust monster as soon as the game is actually played. I like to equate the DoD experience to a moth being lured into a bug zapper: surreal, pretty, and original at first. But you are soon left feeling like your internal organs were just molested by a bag of pasta themed dead squirrels with top hats.

[Please note that this review is based on v1.0 (aka Valve making a few aesthetic tweaks in an effort to pass this game off as a legitimate retail product)]

Where do I start? How about with giving the gameplay a 5/10

5/10 is justifiable due to the gameplay supporting the tactic of “Hiding in a dark spot while waiting for someone to walk into your line of fire so you can shoot him in the knee with your one-hit-kill 98 Karbine”. That’s right, the game has around six weapons that will actually kill your opponent with one shot, regardless of placing. This may seem logical, due to it being a nuisance trying to hit specific body parts in a game with such small targets, but the philosophy is tainted by the players who frontline with these weapons—actually rushing machine gunners and infantry, defeating the entire purpose of the other classes and making the game frustrating for players not skilled enough to practice such lame strategies. It works too. You’ll be hard pressed to meet a player who tries to emulate real-life war tactics.

Let me introduce you to the Fantastic Day of Defeat “I’ma get lucky dis time!” Equation.

It basically works like this. In steps:

1. Spawn
2. Walk out into neutral area
3. Flip a coin
4. If you called the toss, you will not have just been murdered by an enemy perched in an obscure location, holding a sniper rifle or kar/garand, and maliciously typing “lol” or “:D” every time he shoots you. If you failed to call the toss, repeat step one.

The game comes equipped with allegedly accurate gun recoil. I don’t know personally, as I have never fired any of these impressive firearms. It does occur to me however, that the weapons in this game must all hold a particular malice toward God. I say this because it becomes rather distinctly evident that every time a gun is fired, it makes an annoying effort to aim in his direction. This can become quite distracting, as you eventually run out of space on the mouse pad with which to compensate for the copious amounts of recoil, and are forced to reenact Native American scalping rituals in a vain attempt to produce a material with enough friction to serve as a makeshift mousepad add-on.

Within Day of Defeat, the player will encounter maps with varying objectives. Apparently, as this game seems to imply, several battles in WW2 were determined by which side ran into the most flags while yelling “Objective secured!” or “Doke Frodelay Ova!” It seems like a rather silly way to win a war, but I guess it was a different time.

Playing this game will give you cholesterol poisoning. I say this because being a player of DoD gives me the power to shamelessly pass off ridiculous assertions with ease. Just like when you hear someone say “DoD is teh best gaem evar!!!1!”

Graphically, I’d normally give DoD a 9/10 if it weren’t for the fact that to do so, I’d have to apply the standards of 1998 to this review. So since this game runs on the ever popular and rapidly aging Half-Life engine, and costs $30.00 if you don’t already have a HL game from which to play it, and because the engine lacks such crucial features as the ability to make anything look good, I do hereby decree…

Graphics 4/10

It only gets the four points because the number four is pretty and I’d rather type it than zero.

Sound, you ask? Well sir, I can safely say that the sound in Day of Defeat is actually quite suitable. It makes me feel as if I truly am playing a game based on WW2 in which badly rendered enemy models fire at me and hit the vital organs in my shins.

Aside from the nagging feeling you get while playing that %20 of the people on every server hack, the kills that don’t make any sense (like when you get killed through a wall by a grenade), the epileptic seizures you may suffer, the intense urge to castrate a penguin, and the horrible frustration, this is the most fun game you will ever play.

As to replay value, I’m pretty confident that playing this game will become a punitive measure in most boarding schools as a way of showing children that anything bad can happen to you at any time and that there could be a sniper around every corner…

Got DoD?

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 02/20/02, Updated 05/19/03