I’m in a landing craft headed for Omaha Beach. The Germans have undoubtedly set up snipers and machine gunners, sure to shred my comrades and me. Suddenly, the craft and all the soldiers inside begin shaking uncontrollably before coming to an abrupt stop on the beach, where the boatly jitters continue. The crafts open their gates and us Americans are immediately thinned out by the Nazi hordes.

Dead allies fall limply, without any sense of weight or impact.

I look down the beach to see a handful of dead bodies, but a handful of fellow living Americans. Our forces total 16 men. Intel says there are just as many Nazis.

I take aim with my trusty M1 Garand, hearing the faintest bullet impact as a German goes down. I glance to the top right to see if I killed my target. As I’m distracted, I’m shot from God-knows-where before being greeted with a respawn timer that ticks down from 9…8…7…6…5…4…3…2…1.

I’m back in the action, controlling a fresh man. After a few seconds this one, too, falls to the dastardly German sniper.

2…1. I’m back again, much quicker this time. Myself and a few others meander over to the first line of Nazi defenses and plant charges, which explode in a disappointingly small puff.

Oh yeah, I think to myself. I’m playing an Early Access game. 

A few days too soon, a few dollars too much

“Days of War” is not a bad game. The Steam Early Access World War II multiplayer shooter simply has an identity crisis.

Hearkening back to genre classics including “Call of Duty 2″ and—most prominently—”Day of Defeat,” “Days of War” also tries to be something new. The game’s Steam store page proclaims that “THE NEXT GENERATION OF WW2 IS HERE” while it panders to nostalgia hounds with its promises of classic, skill-based gameplay.

“Days of War” nails the spirit of old-school shooters, but falls completely short in the feel department. Movement and shooting is imprecise, a sensation that isn’t helped by terrible sound design and visual feedback. However, weapons are appropriately lethal, with most killing in two or three shots; sniper and bolt-action rifles usually kill in one hit, and shotguns are absolutely dominant in close-range engagements.

Players cannot simply spray and pray. The extreme recoil on automatic weapons assures that semi-automatic and bolt-action users have a fair—perhaps too fair—fighting chance. But aimed fired, even with automatic weapons, is fairly accurate, meaning the most efficient way to avoid fire from any shooter is to strafe back and forth around corners like a lunatic. In motion, firefights end up looking ridiculous a good portion of the time as bitter enemies engage, carefully plotting their chicken dance as they exchange fire.

This focus on what is ostensibly skill-based combat certainly lends to the old-school vibe, but the floaty controls and lack of visceral response do their best to tear that down. “Call of Duty 2” and “Day of Defeat” feel crisp, with the former having hitmarkers and kill notifications, and the latter displaying gratuitous levels of blood when you hit someone. “Days of War” offers no hit indication other than an easily missed hissing sound. You’re simply left to glancing at the killfeed when you think you may have gotten a kill.

The two modes on offer—Domination and Detonation—are unimaginative, but tried-and-true. Domination sees teams battling for control of a linear sequence of five flags, and Detonation has Allies rush Omaha Beach trying to blow up a series of objectives. There are only three maps—Carentan, Kaysersberg and Omaha Beach—and Omaha Beach only supports Detonation, while the former two only support Domination.

Unfortunately, the maps are unbalanced. Picking Americans off is far too easy for Germans on Omaha Beach, because the Axis team has a clear view of the Allied spawns. Similarly, Carentan allows for German snipers to easily set up shop and spawn trap the Americans; there is also nothing stopping players from literally running into enemy spawns and sitting there. Because both teams spawn in a preset zone no matter what objectives they control, there is virtually no way to escape spawn traps other than luck.

Another side effect of this one-spawn-zone policy is that one team can get completely steamrolled if their frontline is wiped out, allowing the enemies to capture any and all objectives between the spawn and the new engagement zone. But even that can’t stop most battles devolving into fights for inches at a few inevitable chokepoints on every map.

I never once saw the Americans win a match on Carentan, and only saw them win once on Omaha Beach. Kaysersberg is more balanced, but I have never seen either team win before time runs out because the chokepoints are so severe. A likely contributor to matches going nowhere is that there is no indication of objective locations on your HUD—you can only see where objectives are if you look at the minimap. Players usually end up just running to the fight, beelining right past objectives that aren’t clearly marked. Such a basic feature’s omission is, quite frankly, inexcusable.

As a result of the shoddy map design, battles don’t feel like they’re taking place in real locations. There are no flanking routes, no secret passages (Kayersberg does have a sewer system that runs underneath the streets above, but it follows the exact same paths so proves unhelpful) to turn the tides of battle. Every match simply ends up as a battle over a few chokepoints, a trait that screams, You are playing a very deliberately designed video game, with strategically placed closed doors to ensure you do not deviate from this map’s simple, predictable three-lane structure. The maps on offer could be easily salvaged if they received a little TLC and some alternate routes to make battles a bit more fair.

Truth be told, “Days of War” is too simplistic and old-school to be “THE NEXT GENERATION OF WW2,” but not polished enough to feel as crisp as the games it takes inspiration from. The game was originally funded through Kickstarter, and the pitch video showcased some more impressive sounds and environments—no doubt as more proof-of-concept than representative of actual gameplay—as well as total destruction of buildings, “Bad Company 2” style. If that is truly a preview of things to come, then the future could be bright. Some larger-scale forest warfare and snowy mountaintops could, indeed, make for more interesting gameplay than the fish-in-a-barrel design currently on offer.

Developer Driven Arts plans to add two more maps, Russian and British content, a map editor and three new game modes in the next few months, but there is nothing here now—other than a fair start—to warrant a purchase. Driven Arts also said there will be better kill feedback, sounds and graphics in the future.

This all begs the question: why was “Days of War” released on Early Access so…early? The game is hardly past the alpha stage, it seems. There is just too much placeholder content and too many missing features to warrant the $25 price tag. There is a solid foundation—Driven Arts is made up of industry veterans, after all—but it all feel a bit rushed.

Wait and see on this one, or wait for a sale.