Medal of Honor: Reboot error or upgrade?

Not Trying to Rock the Casbah

by exterminat

©2010 Nicholas Laborde

I can’t help but notice that we’re seeing a lot of reboots in modern times. And it’s not just limited to our own industry; from gaming’s Wolfenstein, to the infamous Star Trek, we’re seeing reboots very commonly occurring these days due to the lower inclination of developers to start something new (but really, is it more work to reboot a series almost half a century old, or make something new?).

Medal of Honor is one of these titles falling into that category. Except that instead of trying to iterate once more what they had been doing since 1999, they decided to follow suit with the Modern Warfare trend, and start semi-anew. Thus, we have Medal of Honor (which I have an annoying tendency to call Medal of Honor 2010, because I hate the trend of rebooting with just the brand name.)

Medal of Honor is not your typical reboot in that it consists of multiple developers and even, strangely, multiple engines. The campaign was created by new developer Danger Close, running off of the still-chugging Unreal Engine 3, while the multiplayer was handled by Battlefield veterans Digital Illusions Creative Entertainment (DICE), and runs off of the Frostbite Engine 1.5 (which was the version of the engine featured in Bad Company 2).

• Medal Of Honor Gameplay Series & Interviews

The first topic stepping up to the reviewing firing squad known as Nicholas Laborde is the campaign. We follow a few different soldiers through a particularly nasty conflict in Afghanistan, from a typical front-of-the-line Army Ranger, to the group who is the basis of the game, Tier 1 Operators.

The battles, conflicts, problems, losses, camaraderie and all other things presented are based on a true-to-life conflict that is still ongoing, and provides a small insight into what the defenders of freedom have to deal with on a daily basis.

From a story perspective, it is extremely light and does not carry the emotional weight that it should, considering the topic of presentation. Attachment to characters is literally non-existent, people who should make a difference make almost no difference, and the only slightly memorable moment is the very end of the game, which was only remotely memorable to me because it came to an abrupt end.

A five hour tour…a five hour tour…

You can expect to get around five hours from the story mode.

While the story provides the most engaging part of Medal of Honor, that’s about the most entertainment you’re going to get out of this mediocre campaign. If I had to pick one word to describe this single player excursion, it would be “linear.”

It is extremely evident that Danger Close is a new developer, because the campaign itself is perfect evidence. There is literally no player freedom; the game guides you along a set path, with absolutely no room to approach things how you want to. This takes away from the replay value, and reduces any fleeting desire to experience it more than once.

To aid the linearity problem, the game’s AI is absolutely laughable. Nearly every single encounter features enemies that go along a set path, and can be easily predicted. What also aids this problem is that the difficulty level is laughable!

• Medal Of Honor Trailer Multiplayer mahem

If you decide to care about your experience when playing this title, play on the hardest difficulty. Enemies pay no attention to you, but instead, focus on your allies. As a result, your playing experience can only be made harder by your own mistakes. When running through on the medium difficulty, I intentionally ran out in the middle of combat simply to make it more difficult.

The gameplay is nothing new, but does have a few cool features, such as a lean-and-peak system, and the ability to slide into cover.

What does stand out in the campaign, though, is the visuals. The Unreal Engine looks absolutely gorgeous, and suits the game well. One thing that surprised me about Medal of Honor 2010 is that the environments are excellently varied.

More than a brown dusty village…

This isn’t your typical brown/orange desert combat game. You’ll be taking to stealthy night levels in Afghan villages, intense treks through the snow-covered mountainsides, and even crossing the grassy plains on an ATV.

What the game lacks in linearity it makes up for in variety; while you don’t get to pick how you approach things, the game does present interesting environments and draws you into an excellent atmosphere.

My only complaint with the visuals is that they used bloom too much. I’m not kidding. Here’s a typical event in Medal of Honor: Walk onto a vast new battlefield, take a look to admire the beauty, and then a second later get blinded by the bloom.

• Medal Of Honor Singleplayer experience

I also couldn’t tweak the visuals to look just right as a result of this, and it bothered me throughout my entire experience (this also happens in multiplayer).

The thing that impressed me the most in Medal of Honor is both the sound and the soundtrack score. Often times in these types of games, the soundtrack consists of generic metal music that’s tacked on.

That is not the case here, my friends. Medal of Honor features a rich score that fits every moment spot-on, and rivals top contenders such as Halo. I will most likely buy the score to add to my collection, because I enjoyed it so much.

Sound is absolutely brilliant here. In both single player and multiplayer, everything sounds realistic and sends chills down your spine. Authenticity is present, and it succeeds at drawing you into the amazing atmosphere presented.

When indoors, your weapons actually sound like they are going off indoors; the shots reverberate off of the walls and give you the satisfaction of knowing that the game knows where you are and how to adjust things based on that. It’s a cacophony of refined chaos.

Multiplatform: nothing new here…

To most modern gamers, multiplayer is the biggest part of the game. And of course, Medal of Honor features all of the generic FPS action you could ever want.

When the the PS3-exclusive Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune came out, it was praised particularly for the fact that it did absolutely nothing new, but perfected the things that had already been done.

Medal of Honor does not even attempt to innovate for the multiplayer. DICE obviously took the project seriously, but they made little attempt to change what has been established.

The game plays exactly the same as Battlefield: Bad Company 2, and offers a meager four modes and a handful of maps to play on.

The first mode is entitled Combat Mission, and blends the Rush and Conquest game modes of the Battlefield series. You capture a series of flags and blow up objectives.

Mode number two is Team Assault, and is your basic Team Deathmatch mode; the most kills usually wins, but not always, based on the number of support actions your team does.

The third iteration of typical multiplayer action featured here is Sector Control, your average Territories game type.

And last, but not least, we have Objective Raid, which is a complete rehash of the Bad Company series’ Rush mode, in that you have two objectives to capture and destroy.

But this wouldn’t be complete without a leveling system!

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Medal of Honor features your run-of-the-mill leveling and class-based system, with three different classes: your Assault guy, who handles the assault rifles and grenades; the Special Ops class, which handles sub-machine guns and explosives, and your sniper class, who has his sniper rifles.

Nothing out of the norm is presented with any of these and there’s not much incentive to ranking up, besides the usual sights and magazine attachments.

The game also features a killstreak reward system, but it goes by points instead of kills. With each time you get a certain amount of points, you get to choose an offensive or defensive Support Action.

Offensive actions are mortar strikes, air raids, and things of the like. Defensive actions consist of things like personal UAVs for a limited time.

What  – PS3 gets bonus content?

Last, but not least, Medal of Honor’s PS3 version features a high definition remastering of the classic Medal of Honor: Frontline. I have both console versions of the game just for this, and Frontline is just as fun now as it was eight years ago. Also included is Trophy support. Danger Closer did a fine job of tuning the game up for a re-release.

• PS3 Frontline content

Medal of Honor aimed for the sky, and decided to take on the cluster of modern FPSs that dominate the shooter market.

It ultimately fails at doing this, and the result is a chain reaction of mediocrity that poses no major features in an already-crowded market.

“7 /10

©2010 Nicholas Laborde

Editor In Chief’s second opinion.

by XboxOZ360

©2010 Grant Smythe:

Sometimes we often have a second opinion or a Second View Review on various games, especially those that have mixed results with gamers and or  reviewers, and Medal Of Honor (2010) is no exception to that.

I’m a FPS and racing fan, a single-player aficionado who loves nothing better than simply sitting in front of the TV spending hours working through the various titles I have. And personally, I can see Medal Of Honor 2010 as being yet another game, while many say is short on innovation, or gameplay time, that I will spend some precious hours at.

And they are precious for me, being EIC of a site takes a lot of my time, so when a game does catch my attention, it has to offer me something different. Now some will say Medal Of Honor 2010 is nothing more than yet ‘another’ fps, I’d have to agree with them.

But what it does offer the single player is some intense and frantic moments that can have you re-playing the sections through several times in order to achieve success through the entire segment. You will die a lot, some one-hit-deaths are commonplace, and using cover is vital – dahhhh.

This is what I call good game strategy. Getting the player to look beyond just running from the start of the game to the end in the shortest amount of time possible.

All that aside, from the moment I started the game I felt part of it. I felt much more connected to the AI team than some other FPS team-based games, and to be honest, the modern feel and atmosphere of the game brought a level of reality to it that only a few other games have done in the past, one of which is Criterion’s BLACK (bloody brilliant 1st-gen xbox game btw – well ahead of its time).

While some criticise the bland canvas of the Afghanistan terrain, or the repetitive villages, that is what it is like in those areas of the world. Which is why they (Taliban – Al-Qaeda) are so hard to extract from hiding.

I felt I was there, doing my level best at trying to eliminate the Taliban and their supporters, and felt the frustration of the team commander as he was forced to bring in the American ground troops by the top non-military brass who was ignoring the troops on the field’s tactics and expertise.

This has been and is typical of warfare, and having it included in this modern setting added an element of realism to the game as well. Having to be careful not to give away my position, and thus jeopardise those of the team also made it much more tense. I’m not a run-n-gunner gamer, so this pleased me greatly.

Overall I’d have to say the game is worth the purchase, and judging by ‘public appeal’, which has seen the game reach the top of the charts in UK/Eu, then it obviously shows that perhaps the gaming press and modern gamers might be being somewhat over-critical and showing that they have been spoilt by the high quality of games on offer these days.

I’d suggest as a gamer, you take on each new game, or iteration of a franchise as a ‘new game’, and not approach it with skepticism or have high expectations, as by doing so, you have already set yourself up for failure or having a bad experience.

Approach the game with a fresh look, take it as it comes, see what it gives you as an experience, and you may well find the game (this one and others) give you something better than what you had thought in the first place. Any game that scores 7 and above is a game worth getting if it is in your interest range, no matter what others may have to say; allow the game to be YOUR experience, not that of someone else.

Yes, there are glitches, and issues in segments, but show me a game that doesn’t have them, and I’ll show you a game that has yet to be made. If you allow those to become your focus, then you’ll miss out on what the game does have going for it.

I’ll be spending some hours in Medal Of Honor, that’s for sure, and doing the Tier 1 Singleplay Online section as well. Tier 1 is the Singleplayer  Online-Only Segment, which ideally could have you end spending literally hours upon hours in as you try to get up the singleplayer leader boards.

It’s very similar to the Forza 3 global ranking where your singleplayer work places you in various ranking globally from all those playing that particular section or class and splits you with mere thousand’s of a second difference, Tier 1 is basically the same.

It may scare some singleplayer gamers off, but I encourage you to get your hands dirty and start racking up your skills and give it a go.

Sure, it’s a way EA are ‘forcing’ players to be online-all-the-time style gaming, but it also offers the singleplayer gamer some evidence of their skills when compared to other singleplayers around the world. So gamers, go get your hands dirty and right get into it.

“8/10

©2010 Grant Smythe

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Filed under: 3rd Party Games, Console gaming, Game Impressions, New Game Information, New Xbox 360 Games, PS3 Reviews, Xbox 360, Xbox 360 3rd Party Games, Xbox 360 Game Reviews Tagged: | "Medal of Honor: Frontline", Battlefield, Battlefield 3, Battlefield Bad Company 2, Danger Close, Digital Illusions Creative Entertainment, EA Digital Illusions CE, EA's Taliban Conroversy, first person shooters, FPS, Frostbite engine, Medal of Honor, medal of honor taliban controversy, Star Trek, Tier 1, Tier 1 Operators, Unreal Engine, Unreal Engine 3, Video game, War in Afghanistan (2001–present), Wolfenstein