D-Day was released by Konami in 1984 as a war action game inspired by the Allied invasion of Normandy during the Second World War. The player commands a soldier advancing along the coast and further inland, destroying bunkers, guns, and armored vehicles, all while having to dodge fire from several directions at once as chaos unfolds around him — a landing operation full of smoke, explosions, and falling Allied soldiers on the beach.
The game combined a top-down view with regular combat sequences and put an emphasis on planning your advance — a reckless attack usually ended in a quick loss of life and having to start again from the last checkpoint wave, forcing the player to look for safe routes between individual fortifications. The battlefield's graphical presentation, with smoke, explosions, and burning vehicles, was among the more impressive examples of the war arcade genre in the mid-eighties, a genre still taking shape and searching for its own visual language and gameplay pace.
D-Day never reached the popularity of later Konami titles from the same period, yet it remains an interesting example of early attempts to depict historical war themes in an arcade setting, and an inspiration for later war action games with a similar top-down view of the battlefield and its gradual conquest step by step, fortification by fortification, before that same top-down view of the battlefield was taken up by later, more elaborate titles with richer graphics and a greater variety of enemy units.
Why play it: D-Day offers an atmospheric, visually impressive-for-its-time reconstruction of a wartime invasion in arcade form.
Game 101 of 258 for Arcade
