"Great, does half-life proud"

I had seen this mod progress ever since DoD 1.0. It seems it has actually come a long way and even getting official Valve affiliation.

Graphics: 8/10

Well what can I say? Considering that the Half-Life engine is so old now, I can say that the graphics for Day of Defeat are decent. It really tries to make the most out of what the Half-Life engine can give it. Everything from the grenade explosion debris, to the realistic detailing on the guns just makes me want to stare a bit more. However, the blocky graphics and detailing of the game environment overall since the engine is just too old, so I won't think too bad of the graphics no matter what.

Sound: 8.5/10

Sounds are great and seem to add a punch to the game and makes it quite intense. The sound of bullets whistling by you add to this great intensity as well, especially in big firefights with beginners who can't aim, but might get a lucky hit on you spraying. The rumble and whines of the machine guns firing also can give your heart a jump if you have some loud headphones or speakers going on.

Gameplay: 10/10

Wow I can stay up until the night for so long playing this game. The modes are great and there are many fun maps with packed servers to play on. Because of the popoularity of this game, theres always a good selection of well-designed, fun, and exciting maps to play on with many spots to hide, set up a machine gun, and snipe. The maps also have a nice variation of detailing and different levels of floors so that it makes it exciting. One can become quickly immersed in the WW2 environment with the destroyed landscapes in some maps involving towns and cities. The game makes you keep wanting to play with its great replayability. When someone kills you, you just feel like playing some more like Counter-Strike, and you actually feel that completing the objectives actually matter unlike Counter-Strike for the most part. The excitement of capturing flag points slowly and the chance of getting sniped out of nowhere because of the realistic damage modeling can make games very intense. The game also includes many ingenious designs in the gameply, such as the ability to pick up grenades. Most of the people that play will just run from a grenade or just get killed because of the ability to prime a grenade, and pick it up again and then throw it so that it explodes right in front of someone's face so that they don't have time to pick it up kind of ruins it, but when you do have a chance to pick up a grenade and throw it back and actually kill one of their own, it is a great feeling of achievement. Great gameplay in DoD and it also happens to be the category I care about the most.

Interface: 8.5/10

The interface is just basically a normal FPS interface, but some things just make DoD better for me. For example, DoD has the option to let the alliance of fellow teamates be displayed above their heads which makes seeing who to shoot a lot easier. It also happens to lower team killing incidents for friendly fire servers. Also the tooltips that can be turned off really help out beginners to the game.

Conclusion: Overall, I put this mod in my top list of mods for Half-Life which stands among the ranks of Counter-Strike and Natural Selection even! Be warned however, if you don't like realistic games where you can get killed by one or two hits from many guns, then you should play some other game.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 03/25/04