The reboot of the Medal of Honor franchise hopes to go where Call of Duty Modern Warfare went before it. Can it deliver?
I will take the single-player first, since that is the area where most people to expect it to beat the Call of Duty games, as many complained that their campaigns were so short. It uses a different engine to the multiplayer (being developed by a different company), and so you would think it would be well designed, that it would look great and play well. Unfortunately, for the most part, it does not look great. Textures are, frankly, poor, especially in urban environments, and conjured up for me images of PS3-upscaled PS2-era graphics. The guns particularly suffer here, looking very dull. The lighting is a bit better, but still suffers in places, just not feeling right in the night-time scenes. Another thing I noticed where awful fire animations; there was one room where fire seemed to cling to the middle of a wall for no apparent reason – temporarily braking immersion for me. A similarly immersion-breaking experience was when I killed a Taliban fighter on a gantry; his body seemed to fall in-between the bars of metal, his head began rotating 360 degrees and his arms seemed to turn into stretchy ones like Mr Fantastic from the Fantastic Four. Another niggle I found is that it is far to easy to sneak past enemies when their back is turned, even when you're so close that they would easily hear you if you were running just behind them.
However, there were good points to be found in the gameplay and graphics. Some sections, such as the quad-bike sections, are fun and look great, although this may be due to the speed. The mountain sections also look stunning. The cut scenes are the best-looking part of the game, but that's quite clearly because these scenes are not utilising the game engine to render them. The NPC and enemies also look great as well, their equipment and weaponry looking very realistic. Also, the guns feel fairly weighty and the well-programmed controller vibration adds a lot to the realism of the guns. It also seems pretty realistic, especially with all the (mostly non-understandable) military jargon flying about between the characters.
Now to evaluate the campaign itself. It's stand-out portions are few and far-between, having none of the great set-pieces that characterise the series or it's rival, Call Of Duty. The ones they do have seem too contrived, and do not stand out as much as you would expect them too. However, it is solid and will hold your interest well, especially since the missions are fairly varied, ranging from stealthy missions behind enemy lines to big battles to secure large strategic targets. The big let down are the characters. Despite a promise that this would be all about 'the people who fought' this campaign, the Tier 1 operators, there is no real characterisation to speak of, apart from a tiny bit in the opening cut-scene. It does not help that they are all nicknames, not like the characters which had their proper names, with their nicknames in the middle in previous outings. It means that there is no connection between player and the game's protagonists, making the game worse as a result. Despite this, the ending is done well and it becomes quite an emotional scene. However it just makes you wish the rest of the game's story-orientated moments were done as well as this.
Now, on to the multiplayer, which was developed by DICE, of Battlefield fame. I will not write anywhere near as much on this as I did on single-player since multiplayer lends itself to only really analysing the engine, not every match, to evaluate it's performance. It is a very solid shooter with the standard game modes that many find enjoyable. The guns are powerful and can be quite unforgiving, and the often very open maps really lends it to snipers, a class I found myself using more often than any other. Yes, it does not do anything new or any mode particularly well, but I am sure you will get many long hours out of it.
In conclusion, it is a solid game that could use with a lot of improvement, but is a step in the right direction for the beleaguered MoH franchise. Does it beat MW2? No. But it is a good starting point.