Medal of Honor

Medal of Honor was one of the most anticipated games this year and up until this point was promising but little did I know that when I put the disc in that I was about to enter a afternoon of mediocrity. The campaign takes place in modern day Afghanistan and has you play a couple of roles. You play as three different characters that are in different tiers of the military. This really isn’t to important considering they all play the same and each weapon in the game feels identically to any other weapon of it’s type. The characters you play are silent heroes and are always doing the grunt work. Furthermore apart from a few of them having epic beards, all of the characters look relatively the same. The campaign is typical brothers in arms story. Special task force goes in to do some cleaning up with Intel that was received by blind or lazy people. The story does a good job by not touching a clichéd nuclear arms plot and instead focuses on the soldiers and their struggle. The story isn’t a masterpiece but I actually found myself enjoying the simulated experience of the modern soldier.

The game play itself is interesting because it reminds me of whenever I am bored and feel like screwing around after I played a game for real. During the first mission in the game I felt as if all the enemies were Cardboard obstacles in my way. I decided to try just shooting from the hip and too my surprise I found that aiming wasn’t need in a modern military game such as this. Towards the end of the game I found I was able to quickly fire a pistol by clicking in the right thumb stick. When you do this, the game will automatically fire at enemy in your cross hair and will usually get a head shot. I finished the game with this technique and I was happy to see that playing the 5 hour experience on hard difficulty netted me around 450 achievements. Let me reiterate: I was playing on the hard difficulty using the previously mentioned tactics and beat the game in roughly 5 hours. Every ground encounter feels the same and the enemies are incredibly cowardly. They will often retreat from battle instead of trying to stop me. When they do run away they kindly show their back to me where I then proceed to fire at the line of enemies running away. All the cool moments that happen in the game are done by scripted allies. Apart from a few vehicle sections that either have no control or are simply using to move to the next area, you are essentially clearing out wave after wave of dudes.

The multiplayer aspects of Medal of Honor are uninspiring and dull. The multiplayer makes me feel like I am playing a Battlefield Bad company mod that has you play a little faster with hardly any destructible cover. There are very few maps and a few of them seem to blend in with one another. The unlocks are simplistic and typical matches just don’t feel very balanced. Snipers dominate the open maps, shotguns can fire close to medium range and one class has a rocket launcher at the start. The rocket launcher wouldn’t be such a big deal if you used it to take out a plethora of vehicle but there is no vehicle combat to speak of. There were a few moments that I actually had fun with but overall it was a cluster fuck of nonsense.

The campaign uses the Unreal engine and the graphics in certain areas look very impressive. In particular, the lighting is realistic whenever there is a day time mission. Unfortunately the night time portions of the game look incredibly bland. Textures on weapons and clothes look great while the environment feels very insipid. The explosions also look like they are out of an old PS2 game and the blood effect that appears when you stab someone is almost comical. On the technical side I occasionally found some clipping but the most notable issue is Medal of Honor’s inability to keep a steady frame rate. The very first mission starts with your car moving thru a quiet Afghan town and before we even got to the action the frame rate dropped and there was even some screen tearing. I also found that sometimes texture took a full few seconds to pop in which isn’t a surprise given the unreal engines reputation. The Frostbite engine had better environment visuals and was able to stay stable. Although the multiplayer visuals were better then the single player they failed to live up to the visuals of D.I.C.E other multiplayer shooter Battlefield Bad company 2. Load times during in between matches also were a little long.

 The audio of the game feels really good which is no surprise considering EA does some of the best audio in the biz with games like Bad company 2 and Dead space. The voice work is done well with believable performances. They can be a little indecipherable by throwing a lot of current military terms. The ending credits featuring Linkin Park was out of place considering the messages the game shows right before.

Medal of Honor is a mediocre game with an interesting story. It does nothing to innovate and fails on just about every level. I feel that we have to critique a game that says we are going to take back shooters from Call of Duty. Medal of Honor is not a terrible game it’s just not anything special. This reboot needs a reboot………in about ten years.