An honourable game of medals

Review

Played on: Xbox 360
Released: 2010

The Medal of Honor, that's honour without the u, franchise has been around for years. I remember being totally hooked on the first release back on the original PlayStation. It was one of those titles that really put WW2 on the gaming map.

Eleven years later, can you believe it, and many, far too many, WW2 titles later. Both from the Medal of Honor and the Call of Duty franchise, this wartime period is finally being left behind. The new thing now is modern combat and this latest Medal of Honor is wanting in on some of that cake.

First off, the development has to be mentioned. The singleplayer is developed by an in-house Electronic Arts team, called Danger Close, utilising the Unreal Engine 3. The multiplayer, however, is developed by DICE and uses their Frostbite engine. In other words, the two modes look, play and feel different, as they're in fact, two completely separate games! I will review each one separately.


The singleplayer

Moving away from WW2, this MoH game takes place on a two day campaign in Afghanistan. You fight the Taliban as various US special forces soldiers. It kicks off fairly low-key and I wonder why they chose this mission as the first one. It has a too long and non-interactive intro, at least they could've had a training mode prior to it. However, it quickly picks up pace after this.

As you progress through the campaign, you attack an old Russian airfield, take part in large fire fights in mountains, go on a shooting run with an Apache AH64D and do some really exciting sniping and night missions. The variety is excellent but they're short lived. A lot of the missions could've done with being longer, as they're intense, feel refreshing and have a huge entertainment level. You get a feel and taste for them and then they're over, never revisited.



The development team have captured the look of Afghanistan perfectly, the texture work on mountains is particularly fantastic with a natural colour tone, lighting and great weather effects. The animation on enemies is a little sloppy though, especially annoying is the way enemies take far too many bullets to take down. The sound is fantastic, so are the voice overs and military radio chatter.

Controls work well, it lets you duck, crawl and even slide into cover. A great plus is that you can alter the fire rate of weapons. The weapons all look good and feel heavy, but they don’t take down enemies as quick as I hoped for.

The freedom of each level is a downside. While all the environments look fantastic, they all feel very restricted and there’s always a path to follow. In our days, with huge free areas in many titles, it feels restricted. While it may appeal to newcomers in the genre, but if I've got a mountain in front of me, I want to go where I want! EA needed only to take a look at their own Battlefield: Bad Company titles, to know what I'm talking about!



It's a solid singleplayer experience, feeling like an authentic Afghanistan experience and it’s impressive that EA have dared to let it take place in a controversial conflict happening right now. In fact, this makes it a must-play now, so you can experience and understand what's going on in a real-life conflict, rather than old wars you've only seen black and white photos.

Regardless of the entertainment value, it's too short. You're finally getting into the gameplay dynamic, getting used to the fighting, then it’s all over. At times, the experience is a four on the dice, at its lowest it's a three. I’ll give the singleplayer a benefit of its great ideas and current war setting.


Bring on the multiplayer!

I don’t have much positive to say about the multiplayer. It’s a frustrating experience. In principle, it’s not a bad idea. It takes a shot at being something between Call of Duty and Battlefield: Bad Company, but it falls in-between the two chairs. It feels like a sloppy Bad Company at times, with terrible spawn points, incredible amounts of lag and a weird way of detecting who kills or dies first.

The open mode of the multiplayer, with the largest maps, isn’t really anything in comparison to BC2’s similar mode and therefore you simply should play that title instead. The close combat maps are more CoD-like, however, they suffer from the sluggish feeling of the shooting and the terrible way it spawns you up in areas where the enemies are. Kudos that there are no annoying perks and other stupid fictional abilities. It’s a clean old-school shooting game at least!



The gameplay controls completely different from the singleplayer game. This is BC2 gameplay and for people only familiar to the singleplayer of MoH, it’s gonna make them have to learn everything from scratch again. You can’t even crawl on the ground in multiplayer! The design choice for this is so strange and questionable. Compliments for the use of sound and sheer amount of action though, DICE’s Frostbite depicts this perfectly again.

Overall, the multiplayer does work for a few hours, it has an incredible steep learning curve and beginners of online multiplayer should stay far away. It will, however, give you a few great rounds and it has nice variety in modes to play around in, but beware of frustration in the long run.


Summary

As a package, I'd recommend either the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare titles or the Battlefield: Bad Company titles over this game. Go for it if you prefer more authenticity and actually want some knowledge on how the Afghan war looks and feels. Buy it for the singleplayer in other words, not the multiplayer.

Next time EA, I want a longer game and I want the multiplayer to be the same engine/developer as the singleplayer!