Medal of Honor

If first person shooters have taught me anything it’s that I will never ever be a soldier. Medal of Honor highlights that fact even more by being one of the more grounded and true to life first person shooters released. (And me continuing my long standing record of sucking at first person shooter.)

This newly rebooted Medal of Honor takes the franchise out of it’s World War II roots and plants itself firmly in the present day, more specifically in the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan. Like some other recent present day military shooters, you control alternate between a few different protagonists. (Which, I’m not a huge fan of since it makes it hard to really become attached to who you’re playing as.) Unlike some other recent present day military shooters, the story of Medal of Honor is relatively small scale and feels like something that could have actually happened. The scale of the story does effect the time it takes to play through the single player campaign, though. It took me maybe about six hours or so to complete.

Although the game essentially takes place in one country, the environments the levels take place in are varied. From war torn towns to dusty mountains, the game does a pretty good job of establishing a sense of place and varying the missions within them. Some are straight up firefights, others require more stealth and there’s even a level where you’re blowing stuff up in a helicopter. But in keeping with the game’s realistic aesthetic, it can sometimes be hard to distinguish enemies from their surroundings. There were more than a few times where I had to be prompted by my AI squadmates where I should be pointing my gun.

But for all it’s realism, the game seems to have a number of instances where it seems intent on reminding you that it’s a game. There seemed to be scripted events that need to be triggered by certain actions, sometimes on your part, other times on your AI squad’s part. While all games have something like this, most are hidden well enough where you don’t notice them. At one point, I was battling up a hill ahead of my squad and came across a door. Out of curiosity I tried opening it, but it didn’t open. So I figured it couldn’t be opened. A few minutes later, when my squad caught up to me, it opened fine. That’s not really such a big deal, but there were also instances where the game wouldn’t let me progress in spite of completing my objectives. At one point, I needed to stealthily kill an enemy. I did that, but then couldn’t figure out what to do next. I spent a good 10 minutes backtracking to see if I had missed anything. I ended up starting over from the last checkpoint and did the exact same thing as before, only this time I could progress. These kind of things didn’t happen often enough in the campaign to be annoying, but just enough to be noticable.

Although the campaign doesn’t include a way to play co-op, you can play through Tier 1 mode, which allows you to play through a timed version of the missions in the single player campaign. You can freeze the clock by performing well in the mission, i.e., kill streaks, headshots, etc., and your time gets posted where you can check how well you did against other players and more importantly your friends.

As with all first person shooters, multiplayer is a huge portion of the game. The multiplayer mode was developed by a different developer than the single player campaign, but I confess that I’m not experienced enough in shooters to feel the nuance between the single player and multiplayer. Most of the multiplayer modes are team based. You are randomly assigned to either side and choose one of three classes, rifleman, special ops and sniper. As you play through the modes, you level up and unlock different equipment for those classes.

Of the various multiplayer modes, I really liked the “combat mission� mode. In this, you’re given five consecutive objectives to complete on a given map, from blowing up a target to holding a position for a given time. As you complete each objective, you’re given the next one to complete until you either complete all five objectives or the other team kills you enough times. The combat mission mode gives the feeling of playing through a campaign cooperatively but with an opposing team trying to stop you instead of AI controlled enemies.

In some ways, Medal of Honor is both more ambitious and less ambitious than it’s contemporaries. Its story is less bombastic than other shooters out there, but it works to the game’s advantage. And although there were a few flaws in Medal of Honor’s realism, it’s about as realistic as holding a controller can get to actually being in a firefight and that’s about as close as I want to come to seeing combat for real.

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