Medal of Honor is the latest game in EA’s Medal of Honor franchise and is the game’s first step into modern day warfare. This game is very unusual because it was made by two different developers using two different engines for single player and multiplayer. Single player was developed by Danger Close using the Unreal engine and multiplayer was developed by DICE using their Frostbite engine which they used in Battlefield Bad Company 2. The game has players following elite soldiers in the Middle East through realistic missions which were made with the help of real soldiers.
Single player in Medal of Honor goes the opposite direction of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2’s wildly unrealistic Russians taking over the world plot and goes for a way more realistic series of missions that takes place over a couple of days in the middle east. It follows a few different groups of elite soldiers known as Tier 1 operators through the mountains of Afghanistan. The transitions between characters are actually very smooth and don’t take you out of the story. While the majority of the missions will have the player running from place to place shooting everyone they see there are a few unique segments that add some variety. Some of these include; sneaking past patrols without alerting anyone to plant bombs, sniping with a very high-power sniper rifle that takes off body parts and raining down death upon enemy from a helicopter that you don’t control like an on-rails shooter. These segments add a little variety to the campaign but really you’ll spend most of the very short story just mowing guys down, which isn’t really a bad thing for a shooter.
Combat in single player always felt a little ‘off’ for me, I couldn’t quite put my finger on it but it bugged me the whole time. It allows the player to lean which is really useful, slide into cover and also get into the prone position. These features aren’t available to use online because of the different engines used. I suspect one of the things that threw me off in the single player is that hit detection didn’t really work well because there were quite a few times where I knew I was aiming perfectly at an enemy but my bullets weren’t hitting them. Also the collision detection for walls was off in some places as well when my bullets would be bouncing off of invisible surfaces instead of enemies. Another thing that bugged me was the fact that both the enemy and friendly AI sucked and on more than a couple occasions stood right next to each other without doing anything. I’m normally not a big graphics person but there were some serious problems with some of them in this game. The snow looked like a glittery rug, explosions and fire didn’t look good at all and the shadows in many areas were just too terrible to not notice. Single player would’ve been average were it not for all of the issues plaguing it.
Now on to the multiplayer aspect of the game, this is what many people would call the main draw. This part of the game was developed by DICE using the same engine they used for Battlefield Bad Company 2 so things are already looking good for it. Too bad none of the quality from Bad Company 2 rubbed off on this. There are 8 maps and 5 different game types to keep players busy. A couple of the modes include the basic team deathmatch, Team Assault, and Combat Mission, where coalition forces must clear five objectives while OPFOR defend them. All the maps in this game are pretty small to keep the pace of the game fast and moving. If a player is doing really well and gets a good kill streak going they are given access to Support Actions which are similar to KillStreaks from Call of Duty and they allow you to do things like bomb the enemy or get Intel/UAV to see where all the enemies are on the radar. There are 3 classes in the game; Riflemen, which has assault rifles and light machine guns, Special Op, which uses close quarter weapons like submachine guns and shotguns and they also have a rocket launcher, and then there’s the Sniper, a long-range fighter that uses the very powerful sniper rifle.
Medal of Honor online multiplayer is quite the experience and I will probably never forget this game and it is not for good reasons. This game has got to be one of the most frustrating online games I have played in recent memory. For a game that had a couple betas DICE did a very poor job balancing the maps and sniper rifles. Every single match that I played always ended up with one team getting spawn trapped and not being able to even fight back. For example there’s one map where one of the teams spawns behind a building with only two ways out and if the other team is even halfway decent then they can trap them in the spawn and there is almost no way out. The average game consisted of me spawning ready to kill some enemies and immediately dying to an enemy’s support action or if I didn’t die instantly after taking two steps I get sniped and killed in one shot. That’s right, the second sniper rifle in the game kills people in one shot no matter where they hit! A lot of these issues could be possibly fixed and adjusted in patches but it is a shame the game was released like this especially with the betas this game had.
I really wanted to like Medal of Honor, I was a fan of the old World War 2 games but everything about this game just feels rushed and unfinished. The single player portion of the game is the better of the two but that’s not saying much. It provides an interesting story with some pretty intense moments but the bugs, subpar graphics and cruddy combat just drag it down along with the 4-5 hour length. I wouldn’t recommend anyone play the multiplayer unless they enjoy pain and frustration. Hopefully if EA decides to do another Medal of Honor they will have the developers finish the game and make sure everything works.
Gameplay
Graphics
Sound
Overall
Buy Medal of Honor for the Xbox 360 from EBGames.com
Click here to buy Medal of Honor for the Xbox 360 from EBGames.com
