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Medal of Honor Review
Jon Wilcox
07/09/2007
TVG drops behind enemy lines and discovers why Call of Duty 4 has left World War II far behind...
Once the darling of the World War II FPS genre, Electronic Arts' Medal of Honor series has in recent years plummeted faster than a paratrooper with a failed chute. Whilst its lowest point was undoubtedly the dire 2003 instalment Rising Sun, EA has tried in vain to recover the franchise from dropping behind both Ubisoft's Brothers in Arms and Activision's Call of Duty, which is where the latest instalment, Airborne, comes in. Built using what EA describes as a 'heavily modified' version of Epic Games' Unreal Engine 3, Airborne follows Boyd Travers, a member of the legendary 82nd and 17th Airborne Divisions, in assaults against Italian and German forces between 1943 and 1945. Promising that Airborne will redefine the series with its original para-drop starts to missions, the publisher has certainly laid down its intentions, but does it deliver?
The short answer is a resounding no.
One of the main issues with the game rests with the notion of manually-controlled parachute drops, the heart of the 'redefinition' of the series. Painted as a way to create some non-linearity into what has traditionally been a very linear experience, players have the option of landing at pre-designated 'safe zones' in the battlefield or jumping straight into a cauldron of enemy positions that permeate throughout the maps. Whilst sounding like a neat enough idea, something that at least gives players the option to tackle any of the multiple objectives in any order, as a practical experience, it fails to deliver on its promises. Jumping away from the safe zones in later missions is veritable suicide as Travers gets either punched to death by a near-by soldier or shredded by a hail of gun fire, ensuring that most players will just aim dead-centre for the nearest puff of green smoke marking the safe(er) areas to begin a mission.
And then comes the AI of enemy soldiers. Buggy to the point of questioning how Airborne managed to pass through Electronic Arts' Quality Assurance department, the AI is at best satisfactory and at worst laughable. From their lemming-like runs into a small pack of Allied soldiers (which happens a lot) to their envious ability to occasionally withstand several head or torso shots without even taking a sharp intake of breath in response, the German adversaries in the game are steeped in incredibly twitchy old-gen glitches. There are also quite random occurrences where soldiers will run back and forth in a small space - we're not sure whether running around in a dazed and confused state is standard military doctrine, but at least it means that these soldiers are a tad easier to pick off.
AI glitches aside, Airborne also has its fair share of visual bugs, most notably with textures popping in and out, or sometimes not at all. Using a sniper rifle against distant enemies is something that EALA should at least expect people to do, though all too often a target's high-detailed texture doesn't appear, leaving the soldier look like a messy blur in the sniper scope. Far from being a rare occurrence, the failure of textures to pop in even extends to objects much closer to Boyd Travers - at one point a tank next to us looked like an old PSone title...
Like predecessor Medal of Honor Vanguard, released earlier in the year on PlayStation 2 and Wii, Airbourne features upgradeable weapons (attained as players kill more enemies with a gun or grenade), improving their accuracy, clip size, and even throwing in a knife to the melee attack. Added automatically in situ of a mission, the upgrades never feel like an incentive to gameplay, and most fail to make much of an impact in the heat of a battle. The weapons do feel solid however, with heavy recoils from the more substantial machineguns, and a decent kick from the sniper rifles - though as a next-gen title all of these things are expected.
Considering the focus of Airborne on the important role the paratrooper divisions played during the war, the fact that the game glosses over much of the war-turning battles such as Market Garden, Neptune, and Husky, is a serious disappointment. At no point will you feel like you're playing a part in the largest para-drop in history during Operation Market Garden - and the same quite frankly goes for each and every mission thrown into the mix. Perhaps it's down to the limited size and scale of the maps, which are so ring-fenced that the battles feel more like an arena than an interpretation of the divisive confrontations, but either way there are seldom any moments where you get to even dip a toe into an immersive experience. Despite claiming back in early 2006 that Airborne would stick to "historical accuracy and authenticity", the introduction of the fictitious Flaktower level at the end of the game blows the statement out of the water like an explosive shell. Perhaps it's because Allied forces didn't climactically storm Berlin at the end of the war, denying EALA of that perfect Hollywood ending...
Manual para-drops add some originality.
Buggy AI.
Anonymous
Date Added:Mon 17th Sep 2007 21:39
Anonymous
Date Added:Wed 12th Sep 2007 20:49