By Shane Willoughby of thegamingliberty.com
The heart is hard to find when it comes to videogames. In our unremitting need to decapitate hordes of zombies, rank up to level 70 by any means necessary and shoot red barrels in stereoscopic 3D and HD, games often times fail when it comes to the sincerity factor. First person shooters are the chief antagonists when it comes to heart and the lack there of.
Shooters are often like black holes, mindless gun-toting pursuits that look and play perfectly but ultimately suck any credible, humane reflective plot or story line out of their midst because they’re too busy thwarting uncivilised terrorists attempting to drop nukes on the White House.
The door to objective realism in shooters has been open for a while and it improves with every outing of Call of Duty or Battlefield. But it’s just such a shame these games don’t make you ‘feel’ anything. Medal of Honor doesn’t exactly go out of its way to change any of these things, but given that the game is very much reflective of ongoing events in the world, you can’t help but think that all of a sudden you’re playing something that is more real to life than anything else you’ve probably played before.
Medal of Honor is an autobiographical story and although it doesn’t particularly concentrate on any one specific soldier’s experience, it encapsulates the story of every brave soldier on the front line and every family tied together by war and conflict back home. It’s human because it’s real and even if it’s a little transparent at the start, the heart isn’t that hard to find when it comes to developer Dangerclose’s efforts.
Gone is the impetus on WWII conflict; Medal of Honor is now a modern shooter and has the unenviable task of competing directly with the likes of Modern Warfare and  EA’s own Battlefield. Medal of Honor isn’t a proven quantity so it has to play catch up. This first game, the first of many you would think, doesn’t quite soar to the acclaimed heights of its competitors but is nonetheless a credible modern shooter that justifies the game’s new setting in the contemporary idiom.
Hey look, it’s the Taliba… ahem, ‘Opposing Force’
Based on real events and battles fought in Afghanistan, you play a Tier 1 operative in any number of creative and cleverly insular battles against the Taliban. The single player campaign, if a tad short at about 6 hours, is immersive and brimful of thrilling fire fights, chase sequences and rewarding collective team-based combat gameplay. You’ll hang on every bullet and although the game never expands on any one soldier’s individual experience, you still feel like you are a part of something that affects you, your squadron and everyone else back home.
However, it must be said that there is a bunch of near-inexcusable bugs in the title that can really hamper the experience. They needed to be fixed. It’s beyond frustrating when you actually have to reset your mission or return to a previous check point because the game literally has stopped working. It’s inexcusable and these issues need addressing fast.
In terms of gameplay, MOH emulates the tried and tested formulas of Battlefield and, of course, Modern Warfare. This isn’t a bad thing and MOH manages to fit somewhere in between the two. It’s immediately accessible; if you’ve played any other FPS this generation you’ll know how to play this from the offset.
Visually the game also looks impressive, complemented by some clever level design. Saying that, it’s not the most gorgeous shooter you’ll ever see, there are a few jagged edges in there and some of the animations don’t exactly work, but this is only a small gripe, as some of the environments are particularly beautiful.
Giant beard, giant gun – all ruined by the backwards-turning of a baseball cap
MOH’s dedication to authenticity seeps into every facet of the game and this is particularly evident in the game’s sound and audio. It ranks among some of the best sound direction you’ll probably ever hear in a game. The subtle atmospheric tones, the deathly paranoid silences, the roar of gun fire and acoustic explosions add so much to the experience. Military orders and uttering’s over headsets enhance the insular tension in the back streets of Afghanistan after dark.
Multiplayer is a different monster. Developed by DICE and using a completely different engine, MOH’s online play is a little light on the surface. Those of you who are overwhelmed by Modern Warfare’s pursuit of level 70 will take solace in knowing that the level cap in MOH is a mere level 15. There’s no real gimmicks online, it’s much more of an arcade experience than Modern Warfare and you’ll find that you’ll get your ass kicked a lot less with MOH online.
DICE packs just three upgradeable classes, five gameplay modes (for example Team Assault, Combat Mission and Objective Raid) and eight maps and doesn’t exactly offer much in terms of variety. There are not that many weapons to master and those of you who crave a wealth of variation from your online shooters may run out of options pretty quickly. It’s a shame there isn’t more to get to grips with and you can be sure that within a month or two EA will have a chunk of DLC with new modes, new weapons and new maps that they will expect you to couch up your cash for. In its current state, MOH online is slightly hit and miss, I found matches disconnect about 20% and are prone to random glitches. No doubt a patch or two can fix these bugs.
Ultimately Medal of Honor deserves its place among the Modern Warfare’s and Battlefields of this world. It’s not exactly genre-defining, but it does enough to justify being mentioned in the same breath as the aforementioned. It’s got heart and that shouldn’t go un-noticed. Let’s hope this is the start of the Medal of Honor revival the franchise so richly deserves.
Format: Playstation 3, Xbox 360, PC; Developer: Danger Close, DICE
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