Day of Defeat: Source

By Holliday

Hooray hooray! Yet another mod/game has been released with that catchy little word “source” on its rear. Now this would be a great time for me to start into a rant about how Valve is abusing their “source” and rehashing old ideas. But I cannot, why? Because I love Day of Defeat: Source. Even more than Counter-Strike: Source. Honestly, Valve is on a roll here. They have the midas touch. As far as I am concerned, anything with :Source on the end of it will warrant at least a look from me.

Day of Defeat: Source deviates more from its source material (ha) than Counter-Strike: Source did. The big change is the weapon selection. Initially a lot of people are complaining about the removal of some of the weapons from the last Day of Defeat. It is so hard to please these people it drives me crazy. The choices by Valve and the DoD team for weapons are solid. They went for balance rather than “lets use everyone WW2 weapon possible”, and it works. The game is tighter than ever.

There are still plenty of classes and weapons to choose from. Each class loadout is perfectly tuned for their role in the game. Perhaps even more than the original Day of Defeat. You find yourself depending on the classes of others more and the team with a good variation of classes is definitely better off than a team favoring one or two. The game maintains the brilliant Machine Gunner dynamic. An ideal situation has the assault and riflemen attack a point to gain control. Then the Machine Gunner gets escorted in to secure it. A properly supported Machine Gunner is quite an obstacle for the opposing team.

The MG dynamic is fantastic in creating cinematic engagments on the fly. Instead of just team deathmatch the game becomes a series of conflicts that are almost like puzzles to be solved. There is always a way to flank any given area and in many cases it must be used. Once the enemy can hold an area and get an MG set up you can no longer just run at the enemy and hope your aim is better than theirs. Smoke, grenades, combined assaults, flanking and even decoys are tactics quite common. And there is nothing like being pinned against a wall with the hellish fire of an MG ripping right past you.

The only thing I could ask for is a bit more intuitive ‘radio’ command system. Sure you can use your voice headset like all source games but Battlefield 2 has proved that if you put in an easy to use (and dynamic) radio system it gets used heavily and to the benefit of the whole team. DoD:S still uses the 3 long menu choices from old CS. In the thick of combat getting your finger over to 9 to to brief your team is sometimes not worth it. The “Rose” system from BF2 is much faster and easier (especially for spotting).

Overall Day of Defeat:Source is definitly worth the wait. With so much new content constantly being released for Source it is the best value in gaming today. $60 gets you argueably the best single player FPS experience, 3 distinct flavors of online competitive play (standard ‘arena’ style DM, modern squad objective based, war “take and hold” push gameplay), a graphic whore’s dream level, and countless mods being made by near-professional studios. Valve is the first company I would be proud to say I was a fanboy for.