A dead-pan silence hangs in the air, the officer is screaming for a radio to be brought to him and everyone is tense. Suddenly there is a staccato of machine gun fire and a couple of sharp reports of rifles and I look around to see if any of people in my immediate vicinity was my target but it looks like a radioman was cut down a few paces out when he decided to make a move. The beaches of Normandy are a terrible place, that has been made amply clear from the days of Saving Private Ryan but no game puts you in that frame of mind as Day of Infamy.

 

Day of Infamy started its life as a MOD made by the folks over at New World Interactive and the fan-base of their dedicated team based shooter INSURGENCY and now has finally been released into the wildlands of STEAM’s Early Access programme. As a shooter, Day of Infamy is in a weird flux. When most shooters are doubling down on future / near-future and extremely competitive or casual systems, Day of Infamy is set in the well worn battlefields of World War 2 along with a squad system that plays like a mash-up best of BattleField, Counter-Strike and tactical mil-sim shooters. Sure a single good player is going to do some damage to the opposition but a well coordinated squad which might not have the skill-set at the individual level to beat him will tactically nullify that advantage.

 

The biggest strength of Day of Infamy is not the realism but the atmospheric build-up, sure the game engine is Source but deft usage of particle effects and keeping a de-cluttered UI with an emphasis on VoIP communication the game elevates every small gun-fight to a skirmish between two opposing squads which have to tactically counteract each other’s strategies. Lack of information like number of bullets in your magazine, a health bar or a mini-map force one to play the game at a more nuanced pace. All building up a dizzying level of immersion without being as inaccessible as a mil-sim on the lines of ARMA. Talking about immersion, it would be remiss to not mention the lack of aiming aids like a virtual crosshair, enemy marker or kill-cam to see where that pesky sniper is holed up which reinforces one to build on their reading skills of the map and to move more deliberately whilst accounting for possible enemy lines of movement. This spills over into other situations where you blind fire semi-automatic or automatic weaponry in close quarters not because you are confident of landing a shot but because by getting shots off you are keeping the enemy off-balance and preventing them making a deliberate play on you.

 

Day of Infamy brings much needed changes to the team-based shooting fiesta by making certain classes interdependent on each other for maximum efficacy. For e.g., the Support class comes across like a clone of the assault or machine-gunner class but can actually bring in a radio-pack or flame-thrower to massively change up their tactical relevance on the battlefield. With a radio it behooves you to find an officer so that they can call in artillery strikes or smokescreen to cover your teams advance. Alternately with the flamethrower on your back you are expected to be the spear of any advance so that you can flush enemies out of well entrenched defensive positions. You are expected to make such distinctions and choices by reading your team-composition or tactical disposition. Which brings us to the importance of team coordination, NWI does not force this by arbitrarily forcing certain roles to every class archetype, instead almost every class can be built into what you want but with the caveat that there are only so many points to spend on one’s gear that you want to balance it depending on what your team requires.

 

All this is heightened by the fact that every unit has a role to play and a good team is only as good as the communication going between it, you do not need to be an officer to understand the crucial nature of covering your advance with a smoke-screen, neither do you need to be a machine-gunner to understand the need for suppressing the enemy so that they do not take easy pot-shots at your friendlies. If you are advancing, you might sacrifice that extra frag-grenade for smoke and extra ammunition to push the line, alternately on the defensive it might be better to get the radio so an officer can call down artillery on the enemy line of advance.

Which brings us to another point that Day of Infamy manages to do really well, audio, the aural sound-scape of the game is a primal mix of gunshots, artillery shrieks and in-game call outs. Since the game lacks any form of aid to separate foe from friend aside from the silhouette, audio in the form of pre-recorded lines and weapon sounds is a great factor. Every gun in the game has a definitive report, the feared German MG42 / 34 buzz absolutely different to the British Bren or Lewis that happily crunch through their bullets, so do the MP 40’s and the American Tommy and same with the artillery with the German artillery shrieking from afar while the British and American guns have a more plaintive thump. All this while keeping the player informed about themselves and their teammates disposition via call outs (which can be heard by the opposition players).

 

Currently the Early Access has four maps, split across two PvP game-modes and two Co-Op game-modes. You can also experience these maps vs. bots in the single-player if you do not want to break someone else’s hardcore shooter experience. If you are interested in an immersive team-based shooter that is stilted towards an unforgiving, atmospheric experience from the sepia tinted memories of Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers and such, you can check out Day of Infamy on STEAM, Early Access.
P.S. — This early preview of the game was made available through a code given for Early Access

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