Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault

Review written about a year and a half ago, on GameSpot. (My GameSpot account is Pvt.KIDO)

To start off Medal of Honor Pacific Assault has revived the Medal of Honor series with new innovative mechanics, stunning graphics, and intense action. Most of all Pacific Assault brings new fun to a worn out genre of crappy, good and amazing World War II shooters.

Game play: Unlike previous installments of Medal of Honor, Pacific Assault gives you a squad to help you out. They will come in handy for you will easily be out numbered compared to the Japanese. People who have played Call of Duty: United Offensive will know what I am talking about. The mass number of enemies’ on screen at once is over whelming at times. This creates and intense atmosphere, you will never be able to stay in one spot for too long or an enemy will flat out flank you. They will either stab you with their bayonets or shoot you, either way if you are running low on health they will kill you. Just two stabs by a bayonet and you will find that 30% of your health is gone and it will continue to drop steadily unless you apply a bandage on your self.

When you are injured you call for your medic and he will come over and heal you. Be careful though you can only be healed up to four times a level. If you die one of three things will happen…
1) Your medic will come and rescue you, and replenishing your health.
2) An enemy will come over and stomp your face in, slit your throat, or shoot your face to “kill” you.
3) You will lie on the ground until you die.

This type of health system is real well done, it ads a motive not to get hurt, while at the other end, you no longer have to hunt for health packs. More war games should use this type of health system simple because it fits in the war atmosphere and it works really, really well. In Medal of Honor, much like Call of Duty, you can only carry two of any sized weapons, four grenades, four timed explosive bags and binoculars. Ammunition is limited, and weapons aren’t all that accurate. You must rely on aiming down you sights to get a good shot with out wasting ammo. Reloading does take longer than most would expect, but this just ads to the overall realism of the game. Bullets do a good number on you; just around eight good placed rifle shots will put you on the ground, hoping you medic isn’t killed while trying to save you. [Your medic will die but he heals himself.] Machine and Sub Machine guns will take you out faster than you can say Terminator. In order to progress in the game you need to use cover wisely, you need to move from rock to rock or tree to tree. The lean feature as seen in Call of Duty and Call of Duty: United Offensive is also, in this game, just press “E” to lean to the right and “Q” to lean to the left. This will come in handy when you need to take a well placed shot, without getting hit.

Pacific Assault has arcade elements such as the famous red oil containers. Shoot them to cause massive explosions. These containers are in almost every level in high amounts. They are normally placed by towers, which collapse easily, which is why you need to move. If a tower collapses on you, you’re going to die because your medic can’t reach you. However the arcade feel to the game is minimal, and combines nicely with the serious and intense shooter feel.

The only real complaint to make about the game play is that sometimes it can be hard to find your objective thanks to the more than lacking compass. There are also some noticeable glitches. One is when you press the “alt” key your iron sights are to come up and stay up until you hit the key again, for some reason when you quite the game and then re-enter the game again, you have to hold “alt” to keep your sights up. This is a very minor glitch but an annoying one. Another one is sometimes characters will freeze or get stuck on rocks or trees. This isn’t all that bad, it just gets annoying when they are needed to complete an objective or to move on to the next faze of the game.

Overall Pacific Assault delivers an amazing and fun game play experience that has been lacking in most World War II shooters.

Graphics: To start off, you will need a really good machine to have the graphics up. I have a Core 2 Duo 2.18 gigahertz processor, NVIDIA Geforce 7900 GS at its max quality performance, 2 gigabytes of Random Access Memory. I have the settings all the way up at 1280 by 1024 [19” LCD Monitor”] at a 60 hertz refresh rate, and I get at most 40 frames per second. The actual graphics look really good; they really shine in the lighting effects. [no pun intended.] Characters models are good but they still have rectangular figures some triangular joints. Trees, ferns and other plants look really realistic, light reflects off of them pretty well. The weapons are lacking a bit though, for instance the B.A.R. and Thompson look as if they were made from plastic yet, when light reflects on them, they look like metal. Some graphical glitches can occur. During Boot Camp when a person would walk, [it was just for this one person.] His upper half of his body would disappear. Thankfully this did not continue to any other levels. Explosions look amazing however; they tend to eat a big chunk of your frame rate. The physics in this game are done correct yet some funny things can happen. Enemies react like they should when they are hit. For instance I shot a Japanese solider in the shoulder and he grabbed it and hung on to it while he dropped his rifle and took out a pistol to continue fighting. Now to the funny part, an enemy was charging me and I shot him with a 30 Caliber Machine Gun and he flew upward and then proceeded to fall back down to earth. You will also notice that your enemies will grab their “groin” indicating that you hit them in the family jewels. Overall the graphics are flawed yet still look great.

Sound: The sounds in Pacific Assault are all unique and different. No two guns sound alike. Explosions have really nice “Kaboom” sound to them. Gun reloads all sound different and cool in there own way. Your squad mates will talk, sadly 40% of it is all just repeated useless filler, but the other 60% can be rather useful at times. During cut scenes, voice overs at times are spot on and at others not so great, but still well enough that you might not notice but then again, I sure did. Environment sounds could have been better, some background noise like faint gun shots and artillery shells going off would have made the environment more believable but most of the time you are engaged in fire fights so it really doesn’t matter. Other than that sound is sound and there isn’t much to say about it other than its good.

Game play Part 2: The AI in Pacific Assault is very nicely done, enemies will use cover, flank you and retreat if necessary, though most of the time when they are losing they will bayonet charge you in an attempt to catch you off guard. It does when there are ten enemies rushing you and all you have is a bolt action rifle. Like your squad mates, enemies will also talk with them selves but it will be in Japanese so you probably won’t know what they are saying. The Japanese also set traps for you. Some times they will pretend to be dead and jump out and shoot you when you’re not looking. Other times they will ambush you making the environment more believable. There are of course large battles in this game, larger than those in Call of Duty: United Offensive. You will have limited ammo and health on some levels where your goal is to hold “the line” with a machine gun. You will have Japanese every where shooting you, charging you, flanking you, with large numbers over that of five hundred men.
The campaign has a nice length to it about 12-20 hours depending on the difficulty.

It is all rather intense, and very, very hard. Even on easy people will find a good challenge here. Some times I run out of medical kits on levels, leaving me with some hard moments in which I have to rely on my squad to do the shooting. Overall the game play for Pacific Assault gets a

Overall, Medal of Honor Pacific Assault, is a thrill ride to the end, it is nice to play the other side of World War II. I have smoked so many Krauts in European based shooters it isn’t even funny. It’s nice to play against a whole new enemy in a whole new environment, which is very intense. Medal of Honor Pacific Assault rises above hit games like Call of Duty, Call of Duty: United Offensive, and Call of Duty 2. You will not be disappointed with this game. Sadly many people have moved on from the Medal of Honor series, remembering it as an “arcade” shooter, when if fact this brings new life to the series, but Pacific Assault was greatly overlooked and forgotten by a lot. I recommend this game to anyone who wants a new turn of World War II play or is a fan of shooters or the Medal of Honor Series.

Unfortunately I couldn’t get my multilayer to work so I have no review for it.