Medal of Honor is a decent jaunt through afghanistan.
With the Call of Duty series being at the top of its game there seems to be very little room or possibilities for other military shooters to carve out a niche in this ever growing landscape.
Medal of Honor was once a beloved series comprised of first person shooters devoted to the World War II era but as time passed on, Medal of Honor became an unappealing force to be reckoned with and was still stuck in the muddy pits of the second world war, even as other similiar games charged ahead into a modern era, where MP40´s became Ak47´s and germans became hardboiled russian terrorists.
In an attempt to rival this years competition, Medal of Honor takes the war to afghanistan and puts players into the shoes of experienced Tier-1 operators in a two day operation that goes awry. Developed alongside real military consultants, Medal of Honor goes for a realistic approach and does a good job of giving players an insight of how an average day as these operators can be like since you´ll alternate between playing as a footsoldier, pilot and sniper. The campaign is brief but atleast exciting and nicely varied. The game however starts out pretty weak as the early levels are incredibly linear and you´ll move from house to house, clearing rooms and shooting talibans that pop out of cover almost like an arcade ´Whack-a-mole´ type affair. Once you have cleared the prologue things start to pick up as you are thrust into a wide degree of different situations. Piloting vehicles, infiltrating villages and taking out dug in enemies with a high caliber sniper rifle are some examples. Once you have polished off the campaign which will likely take you only a sitting or two, you´ll unlock tier-1 mode where you´ll play through campaign levels with various difficulty modifiers switched on and your job is too gain points through headshots, killstreaks and the like and finish the level as quickly as possible. There is a built in leaderboard per level which might build some incentive if you feel competitive.
Speaking of competition, there is a multiplayer component developed by DICE but sadly its pretty lackluster. Modes are practically a copy-paste from Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and maps are all structured the same with buildings and corners dominating each side with chokepoints in the middle. You will get dropped by snipers time and time again which makes playing actively almost punishing. Toss in only three classes and routine unlocks, it isnt likely to hold your interest for a very long time.
Medal of Honor was built using two different engines; Unreal Engine 3 and the Frostbite engine made for the campaign and multiplayer respectively. While the lighting is very well done, textures appear ugly and the detail is far too toned down in the multiplayer which makes telling enemy apart from terrain almost completely impossible and framerate jitters and downright dies on a few occassions in the campaign. The sound however is outstanding, top to bottom. Explosions and gunfire are all well and good and the voice acting is very sharp, even though the dialogue relies too much on military acronyms (i.e AQ - Al-Qaida, Delta Hotel - Direct Hit, CAS - Close Air Support) even to the point where the objectives start to display wierd variables such as Dshka (essentially dug in, 50-cal machine gun). But as a whole, the dialogue and voice acting are well executed.
Medal of Honor is a solid reboot of a series that has been deemed dead up until now, yet for all the things it does right it also does a few things wrong. The campaign is nice but the multiplayer is extremely derivative and suffers from poor maps and uninteresting gametypes and matches basically just boils down into camp fests and when you tack on the lack of any cooperative modes, its worth a rent but not much else.
