First a big thank you to Valve for providing Day of Defeat Source for this Review.

For those that haven’t played the game before this is a World War 2 first person shooter game. One side are the Americans and the other side are the Germans, witch you can pick to be either side. Your job is to go and capture the flags or defend the flags for your side. You capture more and more flags on the map as you progress through the map till you hold them all. If your team holds the flags for a certain amount of time your team wins the round.

Over all the game graphics in the game are pretty good. Some of the weapons in the game in terms of graphics are well done. The in game physics though are something else. Just like in Counter Strike Source there will be times in this game where you will see a guy go flying threw the air after he has had a grenade tossed at him and it will blow your mind to see this. I think the Source engine is kick ass in terms of its physics. The sound in the game in my stereo headphones sounded pretty decent as well.

I really like the way they made some weapons work. For example if your a sniper and you zoom in using the scope you end up getting scope drift where your cross hair drifts around. I’m glad they put this scope drift into the sniper rifles to make using the sniper rifles a little more realistic. When you take the sub machine gun guy and goto shoot his weapon it sprays all over the place. You have to lay down to use it and then hit your secondary fire button and bring down the bi pod. Only once the bi pod is deployed do you get a cross hair to aim the gun with. I wish other games would do things like this specially Counter Strike Source and its AWP sniper rifle, it could use some scope drift.

I did find some weird quirks with the game as well. The very first time I loaded the game up and joined a server I was attached to a guy beside me. Neither one of us could move and I tried everything and we were stuck there at the spawn point. It wasn’t until I killed the guy that I could move freely. The other odd thing was tonight a couple of times I jumped out of some high up windows that should have killed me. When I hit the ground I kept on moving for a few feet then dropped dead. I had this happened to me two times.

The performance of the game seems to be hit and miss as well. Sometimes it will run really smooth and then other times you get bogged down on a spot on the map that you previously were moving around in fine. To go along with that the odd time you will stop dead in your tracks for a few seconds sort of frozen but doing like a jitter type of movement and then all of a sudden you will continue on your way. That pausing like that in the middle of a fight I used to see in Counter Strike Source and it would drive me nuts to have that happen right in the middle of killing a guy and then I end up dead.

Then there is the issues of the maps and the fact there is only 4 official ones to play on. This is one thing that could hurt the game in the long run. People want to play on cool maps they haven’t seen before and they would like a fairly good selection of maps. This also happened with Counter Strike Source as well. It was released with only a handful maps compared to what the original had.

One thing about the bugs and the maps though and this I’m pretty confident of, is valve will stay on top of this and add more maps and also stomp out some of the bugs that are currently in the game. The only thing I wish Valve would do right is not release a game with only a handful of maps and in such a buggy state. One good thing about the map problem is from what I can see in the map list it looks like new maps are showing up that are user created. If you get enough users making good quality maps that will hold the game over till Valve releases more of its own maps for the game.

So in conclusion I think the game is worth the $19 U.S. At under half the cost of most games you really can’t go wrong getting this game. I know I will keep an eye on it in the future and see what types of maps and updates Valve adds to the over all game. I should mention I got my copy of the game via steam and it took around 80-90 minutes to download. After it did the download I played it a bit then exited and when I loaded it up a second time there was another update and that took about another hour to get.

This game was tested on the following machine with all the game settings on high with a screen resolution of 1024 x 768.

AMD XP 2500
ASUS A7N8X MOTHERBOARD
2 GIGS OF PC 3200 RAM
ATI 9800 PRO 128 MEG
2 SEAGATE 7200 RPM IDE DRIVES

Below are some pictures of the game enjoy!

This is a picture of the main loading screen.

This is a picture of the team sellect.

This is a pitcure of the character sellect.

This is a random ingame picture.

This is a random ingame picture.

This is a random ingame picture.

This is a random ingame picture.

This is a random ingame picture.

This is a random ingame picture.