This October EA is back with another military shooter to battle the endless hegemony of the Call of Duty series later this year but from our first look, is Medal of Honor: Warfighter a hit?
After Battlefield 3 did the impossible and made a notable dent in the sales of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (which is now falling off sales-wise compared to Black Ops at the same timeframe the year previous), it’s understandable that EA are readying another military shooter this year.
The problem is that aside from three forthcoming expansion packs for last year’s 13 million+ seller, we won’t be picking up a new boxed Battlefield title this year. Instead, we’re back to the Tier 1 Operators from the reasonable yet somewhat indistinctive 2010 Medal of Honor reboot.
This time around, the series is going global and promises that instead of simply focusing on elite US special forces soldiers (a former Tier 1 Operator named Tyler demonstrated the game recently for us and had the biggest forearms we’ve ever seen – true story), a new global threat requires a global response.
To that end, while Warfighter will focus on US protagonist “Preacher” and his fellow teammates, the game will also feature 12 different Tier 1 units for its online multiplayer mode, including the British SAS, German KSK and the Polish GROM.
Similarly, the single-player missions are inspired by real world events and real-life terrorist threats, including an assault on Al-Shabaab’s “Pirate Town” on the Somali Coast and in our case, a level that featured firefights against Islamist separatist group Abu Sayyaf in the Phillipines’ Isabela City.
The guided demo began with a brief title card reading “Inspired by actual events” and what followed was a title that at first glance, due to its similar gunplay and Frostbite 2 graphics engine, could pass for a lost level of Battlefield 3.
The setting itself was a flooded hotel, as “Preacher” and his team investigate the source of where Abu Sayyaf are holding hostages. After some non-descript battles while ascending to the next floor of the area, we witnessed the most innovative concept in the demo was shown – multiple options for breaching the door behind which the hostage are being kept.
After Popeye-armed demo player Tyler chose a flashbang, the character picked his shots wisely in slow motion and piled the hostages outside where two speedboats were waiting. Here “Preacher” and a Captain Soap (of the Modern Warfare trilogy) lookalike escaped through the flooded city by manning the speedboat’s heavy weapons amid armoured car attacks, falling tree lines and an admittedly spectacular bridge explosion before a Chinook evacuation brought the mission to an end.
Although it’s far too early to judge what the finished version of Warfighter will have in store, the footage we were shown was effective rather than groundbreaking.
Though we like the idea of playing as up to 12 nations in the as-yet largely unknown multiplayer component, the single-player mission we were privy to had much the same heavily scripted, explosion-heavy gameplay thathas led to a paucity of genuine innovation within the military shooter genre.
Hell, even a little more thought from developers Danger Close might have led to a less generic title than ‘Warfighter’.
We’ll hold off on calling further judgement on the game as there is a long way to go until its Irish release date of October 26 but we’re hoping that our next look at the military sequel is a little bit more memorable than our first impression.
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