Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrowing our laser focus to one game per week (at least). Be sure to check out the Case File Repository for more details and a full list of games/links!

I'll admit, while booting up this WW2-era first-person shooter first released fifteen years ago, my hopes weren't exactly high. Medal of Honor: Frontline is the first PS2 game in the Medal of Honor series, which began on the PS1, and one of several games in the series to be built specifically for consoles. I believe it's also the first game in the series to take advantage of dual-analog sticks for movement and aiming: a control scheme still in its nascency, if the opt-in nature of its inclusion here is any indication.

Originally, I didn't know what to make of the game. It's sometimes difficult to judge an older game's place in the evolution of its genre without being familiar with its contemporary peers and the games that immediately preceded and succeeded it. Its pedigree was apparent enough - the game relays the gritty violence of World War II quite vividly, and the music's got this movie orchestral feel to it due to the work of film soundtrack composer Michael Giacchino - but there's a lot about the game that required some adjustment. Take the chaos of the game's Omaha Beach landing introductory mission for example, which felt more than just a little inspired by the bombastic opening of Saving Private Ryan. (Spielberg's emotional war movie was released back in the Summer of 1998, which makes it odd that it took the fourth game in this series - which began in 1999 - to reference it. Or maybe every Medal of Honor starts with the Normandy landings?) Suitably for such a turbulent maelstrom of bullets, explosions and viscera-splattered sand, there's almost no direction given here and you simply have to piece together where to go from your immediate mission targets as you keep your head down from being blown clean off by relentless Nazi machine gun fire. This list of checkpoints periodically makes itself known while playing and is presented in full when the game is paused, but doesn't offer much in the way of letting you know how to reach these mission targets. It's a holdover from older FPS games which are very much not in the business of holding your hands with prompts: it's more like GoldenEye and that generation of shooters, with vague mission requirements you need to scour the level to find.

At the same time, every stage besides this opening beach assault is as about as linear as it gets. You simply follow the trail of alive German soldiers to shoot until you come across something that looks like a mission target - whether that's an ammunition storage to blow up or secret plans to collect or vehicles to sabotage - and then press the "action" button to do the "action" the game desires, and then you're back to shooting down Jerry en-route to whatever the next objective might be. Usually, new doors will fly open or explosions will poke crawlspace-sized holes in walls once a mission objective has been met, practically guaranteeing that you won't ever lose track of the critical path or miss a vital mission requirement. I suppose you might say that Medal of Honor: Frontline sits within that chrysalis stage between older FPS games where you'd run around headbutting walls for fifteen minutes near the end of the level to find that last key so you can finally move on already, like Doom, and modern FPS games which stick proximity cursors on your periphery at all times that tell you exactly how far and in what direction you need to go, like Doom. The linearity is more than a little contrived in Frontline, since it locks approximately 95% of the doors you might come across (in fact, it's less "this door is locked" and a more direct and earnest "this door doesn't open"), but I don't suppose I can begrudge a little railroading to assist my directional-sense-impaired modern gamer brain.

The biggest issue is the aiming. I remember the nightmare that was trying to accurately aim guns with crosshairs in early console FPS games that did not include auto-aim, or at least some kind of correctional aiming assistance. These aiming controls feel far too sensitive (I haven't counted out the possibility that this new third-party controller's to blame) and I usually find myself relying on the Springfield sniper rifle just because it presented me with larger targets to aim at. Even shotguns, which provide a balm to those who have trouble pointing guns in a more accurate ballpark than the general postcode of the people they'd like to kill, is a real bear to actually hit anyone with. The AI for their part are fairly smart, taking cover behind walls and crates in the area and letting you waste your time popping out for shots, though plenty of them just kind of stand out in the open waiting for death. This is particularly true of those that stand on rooftops to snipe you, though I imagine they'd be pretty hard to see if they didn't expose themselves. Overall, I was impressed enough with the tactical wherewithal they exhibited, if not always wowed by it.

I dunno. I think Medal of Honor: Frontline holds up for the most part: it's not horribly oblique; it has a fine presentation (the jerky character animations excepted, which sometimes makes NPCs resemble twitchy Silent Hill monsters); it has some fairly novel ideas for its level design which so far has included a U-boat infiltration and a stealthy incursion into a German-occupied Dutch town; and I'm just about getting the hang of hitting something if they stand less than a hundred yards away and don't move around much. I dropped the difficulty down to Easy also, as the game refuses to checkpoint between the start and end of missions and they can take up to fifteen minutes apiece (and that's if you know where to go at all times, which I didn't always). Hey, it's World War II: no-one said this was going to be simple. All the same, I'm not sure an antiquated WW2 shooter for the PS2 was ever going to be something that would hold my interest in 2017. Still, why have this series if I'm not going to experiment a little with games outside of my wheelhouse? Especially when I inexplicably own a copy of them. We'll revisit this series one more time with Rising Sun later this year, but I don't hold out a huge amount of hope. I suspect there's a reason why World War II shooters died out the way they... oh right, I forgot already.

Result: Eliminated.

< Back to the Case File Repository