Day of Defeat

"Half Life's engin is used for WW2 now!"

Half-life’s engine never fails and makes a great WW2 mod which like counterstrike, turned retail.

Day of Defeat is a great FPS that is based of a half-life engine. This game involves lots of teamwork if you play to win the levels with your team. DoD will put you in real life situations that were in WW2 like storming Omaha beach for instance. And now in v1.0, you can play as the British army as well as the Americans and the Germans. The action doesn't stop in levels though when bombs rain down in all directions, and cover is your only option sometimes.

You will get to choose a number of classes but its actually more like just picking what kind of gun you will be getting because picking a class gives you no extra abilities. You can drop your current weapon and change it to some dead soldier’s gun and use just as good if you picked it in the first place. But this also gives you a advantage because you can pick up the enemies weapons. Get a good vantage point behind the enemy and just keep killing them because they will think its there own team shooting. And Mg and other guns can put down the bipod that makes their gun super accurate, of course you can't move while in this mode. The British though lack guns but the ones the give you are very good and if all else fails, steal a German one.

Graphics 8/10 Now I want to give this game a ten for producing such nice detail with a HL engine but HL graphics are kinda out dated now. Yeah it does take up a lot of ram but if you have a good computer you should only worry about your connection then. But Detail is such a nice factor here. If some one gets shot in the head, his helmet will fly off. Sand bags and water will kick up water and dirt when shot at. And the fog effects are very nice and give a great atmosphere to the game. And the guns are so authentic and they don't look like crap at all.

Gameplay 9/10 Very nice. You will start out with around 400 servers to pick from (I have the filter on so there is more than 1000.) And when you enter a game you will decide on what team you will be on, American or British against the Germans. Then you will decide on your class. After that, depending on the level, you will have to complete a number of objectives. There are two kinds really, but they are unique for the most part. The first one, which is never different, is capture and hold where there are flags in the city or town and you need to capture them. Sometimes you will need more than one person to capture a flag. Then you will need to capture the other flags in the town and when one team has all the flags, they win.
The second kind is unique kind where they are kinda the same but like I said, unique.
Defend/Invade, where one team will have to destroy a number of things on the opposing side like Omaha beach. In that level, the allies storm the beach while being hailed by machine gunners and snipers and blow through everything with satchels. There are others that involve both teams attacking with out having to capture flags.

Sound 9/10 The shooting the explosions, the voice communication (with a microphone), the voice commands (Already in the game) and everything else makes this game what it is.

Story 8/10 Well its online so for the most part that means there is no really story except the excuse in why you are shooting. But since this is WW2 and the all he battles took place in real life, it gets a good score.

Replayability 8/10 Well its a action packed WW2 shooter online so that pretty much means that DoD is going to last a long time.

Final Notes* If you have HL you can just download this game with ease. If you don't have HL or CounterStrike, then I suggest you buy DoD and then download Counterstrike and other games that are mods.
Also 56k players can find pretty decent games as well with a decent number of people in them and get a nice 250 ping, This is good for 56k because in this range there is no lag that effects you. I do suggest eventually upgrading to a better provider like I did finally, I am getting DSL, I just need to wait for the modem to come in.

Overall-A great game that live up to WW2 after years of development being on the fan-based world to the retail world.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 06/08/03, Updated 06/08/03