Day of Defeat Review
Despite its flaws, Day of Defeat offers unusually intense gameplay with excellent pacing, good weapons, and a really fine combination of all-out action and teamwork.
Day of Defeat offers two basic gameplay modes. On territorial control maps, each team fights to capture a number of flags by running over them or temporarily occupying an area near them. This mode can create some epic, back-and-forth struggles--in fact, some players may find that these battles go back and forth for too long. Capture/destroy maps offer a variety of timed offensive and defensive goals that vary by map. Axis troops, for example, might need to destroy two British tanks before time runs out, while also preventing the British from grabbing German battle plans from a downed glider. Both of these modes can be great fun, though the game could definitely have benefited from more modes, particularly since it is already limited by its narrow geographical and temporal scope, lack of vehicles, and small selection of playable nationalities.
Day of Defeat ships with 15 reasonably diverse maps that will have you fighting through bombed-out cities, battling through quaint rural villages, and storming the Normandy beaches on D-Day while mortar rounds explode all around you. The objective-based maps can be convoluted, but the maps are well designed overall. They offer all kinds of tactical opportunities, with alternate routes and numerous places to take cover or ambush enemies. Of course, that means there are countless places from which you yourself can be ambushed, and that, more than anything, is what makes teamwork important in Day of Defeat. If you don't cover your buddies' backs in these deadly environments, you probably won't survive too long yourself.
While the game's maps certainly have interesting layouts, they aren't always especially attractive. Though the designers clearly put a lot of work into the game, Day of Defeat is powered by the original Half-Life engine, so it can't really compete with more-recent graphics engines. Even so, some of the maps feature interesting little details, like rain-filled bomb craters in the middle of a street or a cow casually grazing near German fortifications in Normandy. The game's character models and a few other graphics features have been improved or added for this release, but the visuals just don't draw you into the action quite as well as they do in more technically advanced shooters.
At least Day of Defeat sounds good. The game has vivid weapon effects and plenty of preset audio commands in the appropriate languages. With the right hardware, you can also use live voice chat to communicate with teammates, though the voice chat currently has technical problems that frequently cause it to be so garbled as to be nearly useless. The game's visual presentation may not be as immersive as that of other first-person shooters, but the ambient sounds of gunfire and explosions compensate for that shortcoming to a certain degree.
For all its strengths, Day of Defeat really could have used more polishing before being released as a retail game. It still has a variety of bugs, some of its weapons could probably use some tweaking, and its network code suffers from intermittent lag and frequent connection problems. Yet despite its flaws, Day of Defeat offers unusually intense gameplay with excellent pacing, good weapons, and a really fine combination of all-out action and teamwork.
- GameSpot Scoregreat
Player Reviews
Critic Scores
- IGN 8 / 10
- Gaming Age B+
- TechTV 2 / 5
- GameZone 9 / 10
- Worth Playing 9.3 / 10
- Mygamer 7.8 / 10
- 2404 - PC Gaming 9 / 10
- GamePlasma 8.2 / 10
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- Release: May 6, 2003
- ESRB: Teen
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