Welcome do D-Day! (Deliverance Day, or so I'm told). In this 3D first
person shooter, you play a GI who's one of the first to land on
Normandy, whose main responsibility is to clear out the beach to
ensure a successful landing. Right off the bat I'll tell you those who
aren't fanatical about war games and are pampered by mouth
drooling graphics from Quake2 and Half-life from their Voodoo2
cards need not to bother with this game. To be honest, when I first
saw this game I thought it was an add-on for Doom2, or Duke
Nukem 3D which is where the engine from this game comes from.
If you can still remember what the Duke Nukem 3D engine looked
like, that is exactly what you should expect from this game. It
defaults on 320x240, which in my opinion in today's technological
age, is painfully punishing on your eyes. I immediately switched to
"Vesa2.0 compliant" 800x600, which is the highest the setting will
go, and was greeted by the nostalgic looks of Duke Nukem 3D
scene. The game starts you off in a lander boat that you'll
recognize from the beginning of the movie Saving Private Ryan.
The boat's doors open and you hustle out with your fellow freedom
fighters into the beachy waters while you seek cover dodging a
hail of bullets from bunkers.
I had a really big problem with sound. Unfortunately, I was not
able to get sound effects from this game. The reason here being
that this is a DOS game, which works well under Windows9x,
except you need to get a program called Sticky Keys so you don't
keep alt-tabbing out of the game every time you hold down control
and a hotkey. Anyway, since this game runs under DOS, I was only
given the option of assigning my IRQ for my SoundBlaster LIVE as
5,6 or 7. I looked in Windows System and found out it was on 11. :(
So I tried editing the config file manually and placed it as 11 but it
was no go. Midi worked fine but no sound effects. Anyhow, the
MIDI I found was quite weak, and sounded very unsatisfying. I was
hoping for some blood pumping, adrenaline sounds but I was
unsurprisingly disappointed (what game still uses MIDI?).
This game isn't as easy as it looked. It takes practice, which some
people may not be able to bear from a game that just seems so
inferior to what is out on the market today. You can't just run in
and storm the place, instead you have to seek cover, and from the
safety of your cover, you try to nail as many Axis soldiers as you
can. You have fellow soldiers that help make up your platoon but I
hardly found the AI controlling them very useful. They kept
shooting at empty tanks right in front of them and they sometimes
got stuck banging into a wall or running off into the ocean! You
can keep track of them with a "morale" meter, which goes up to
100 and drops as your platoon gets dissipated. Bullets in this game
do a LOT of damage and you run out of ammo very quickly making
this hard even on the easiest setting (Draftee). You have multiple
weapons which you can use (Thompson gun, automatic rifle, knife,
grenades etc.) but it doesn't make the game that much easier.
Seeking cover and shooting from the safety of it is your best bet at
this game.
WW2GI supports 8 players over IPX. Couldn't find a place to test
this out multiplayer, so off we go once again to my home network
to test this baby out. This game supports Co-Op play, Deathmatch
w/spawn and Deathmatch w/o spawn. This game has nothing on
Duke Nukem multiplayer. I found it really boring and unbearable.
This game was released about 2 years behind its time. This would
be really great for a Doom2 or Duke Nukem wad but not a
stand-alone game on its own. I could only recommend this game
to WW2 enthusiasts and perhaps gamers who have really low end
PCs that are looking for something new(?) to play. If you
remember a game called Xtreme Paintball, you would recall it
being marked as "Dead On Arrival". Old graphics, boring and
repetitive gameplay and brain numbing sounds like Paintball,
blow this game out of the water.