Medal of Honour: Reviewed

Games : News

Friday, 15th October 2010 Written by: Tenacious T

Time for Medal of Honour to hang up the boots?

I came into the new Medal of Honour game with high hopes. What I got was simply amazing… that is if I was playing this four or five years ago.

The game starts out very similarly to the original COD: Modern Warfare as in you are stuck in a car watching a cut scene for about ten minutes. The game based in Afghanistan begins with you and your crack team of elite American soldiers (which seem to have been incorporated into every war game recently) undercover infiltrating Al-Quada and surprise surprise something goes wrong. This got me into the combat which is… ok. It feels like COD but not as refined or polished. Movement seems a bit sluggish along for that matter with enemy AI.

For example I threw a grenade at an enemy terrorist and granted he ran out of the way so he didn’t explode. But what the problem was that instead of running to a different area of cover, he ran around the box he was hiding behind and crouched down right in front of me making him easy to pick off. This was on the hard difficulty too and if I’m playing on hard I really expect to be challenged, not to be fighting people who apparently believe they are impervious to bullets.

Previous Medal of Honours have been set in the past and it appears that the game designers forgot they’d stepped into the modern era. After a short while playing I suddenly found myself in what appeared to be a WW2camp with what looked like an army van from the 1920s surrounded by tall towers and what looked surprisingly like the trenches . It was like WW2 starring Al-Quada for a bizarre moment in gaming reality.

Graphically speaking the game is pretty good. Some explosions seem quite blocky but again it looks very Battlefield/COD but just not as crisp.

It’s got all the key ingredients to be a good game but it’s just lacking that something. I knew something wasn’t right after the first couple of missions I found myself bored and thinking that it’s just the same old thing over and over again. I really was trying to enjoy it but I was struggling. As for the game being realistic, as far as I knew war did not involve a group of three or four people taking down the entire terrorist forces but then again I’ve never been to war so I can’t really comment.

It’s not that the game is necessarily bad it’s just that it’s all been done before. Modern Warfare has become boring, the only reason Modern Warfare and Battlefield gets away with it is because they established characters when the idea was new, innovative, and fresh. As for the “controversial” inclusion of the Taliban it really didn’t seem that different to fighting nameless terrorists in any other war game and seemed more like a PR stunt on the part of MoH than anything. Controversy creates cash and it probably will bulk up the sales but it really didn’t affect how I felt about the game remotely.

The story interweaves between three factions of the Taliban, Army Rangers, and an Apache helicopter gunner with a relatively fluid transition between the three stories. The development team included former military personnel to achieve a sense of realism in the game but aside from the tremendous looking cut scenes I don’t think they did a great job. As I previously mentioned it feels like it’s you vs. the world. A war game for me to be realistic needs to feel like you ARE in a war not just a crack squad of troops who take down an entire army single handedly.

The online mode is worth a play but again while entertaining I think I could have just as much fun playing the FPS games I already own rather than shelling out fourty quid for this uninspiring attempt at warfare.
Medal of Honour attempts to give you a realistic modern warfare shooter and I think it’s failed to do that. It is a perfectly playable game but you can go back to Modern Warfare 2 or even Modern Warfare and you will have a more enjoyable, involving, engrossing playing experience. If you are willing to avoid the minor slip ups that have been made though you will have a good time. Maybe not one for the classics section. It’s playable but definitely not memorable.