Medal of Honor looks to be EA's newest attempt to steal the spotlight from Call of Duty. Fueled by Danger Close studios and DICE, it seems to have had ample resources to make itself a good game. Let's see how it turned out.
Presentation 9/10: First off, the scope of this game is a little refreshing. No Russians invading, no Nazis, no undercover conspiracy theories, just an attempt at realism. The game follows some Navy Seals and Army Rangers through a battle in the Middle East war with the Taliban. You play a variety of missions through large scale firefights with insurgents to special ops navy seals raiding villages, to marking targets for an AC-130 to destroy, controlling the weapons of an Apache, and super long range sniping across mountain tops. At times the game is a little too scripted, but this is somewhat necessary for the atmosphere. The characters are a mixture of goofy Battlefield Bad Company attitudes and GI Joe serious from Bad Company. What's good is that they're human. One character is impatient, one is a soft spoken and professional soldier, and one is even a backwards hat, wearing long-bearded, and sunglasses bearing guy named Dusty who probably doesn't play in a band called ZZ Top. There's also some nice cutscenes to help flesh out some of the characters and the plot. The menus look decent enough, you know where to go when the game starts up. Campaign or Multiplayer. Lets start with campaign.
Gameplay: 7/10
The singleplayer is good enough, but very short. I beat it in one day, about 2 hours when I came home and another 2 before I went to bed, on hard mode. Despite this, what you do play is pretty fun. There are a lot of good features to the game. Your fellow soldiers can give you ammo, you can switch between single shot or full auto for many guns, double tapping Y will switch to your sidearm (A welcome feature from other games where a sidearm = another assault rifle you can pick up) meaning you can carry two guns and still have an emergency pistol, the reload animations are accurate depending on if you empty your magazine or not and ammo per gun, etc, there is appropriate gore for shooting someone in the head point blank with a shotgun or 50. cal sniper rifle, and nightvision is available whether you need it or not. There are also a few stealth scenes, which work well enough.
There are plenty of problems despite this. Hit detection is wonky, especially with grenades. Grenades in this game like to bounce off of invisible walls and kill you. There's also an attempt at bullet travel time, which equates to working at long range, but taking half a second to hit a target at point blank range. There's also a frustrating lack of guns to use. You usually start a mission with two American guns, which you will pretty much have to use the entire mission. Enemies will only drop AK47s, AKS47us, or RPKs. Rarely you will find an RPG or an insurgent sniper rifle with maybe a dozen rounds to use, in fact most weapons you find on the battlefield with have 20 or less rounds. There are more guns in the game, it includes an MP7, M4, M14 EBR, M24, M249, M60, and G3, but you usually will not be able to use more than one of them per mission. Even if you find a lot of other weapons on the ground that your allies or enemies were using, the game doesn't let you pick them up. It's also annoying that enemies can kill you in one shot with an RPG from behind cover. There's also pretty much no recoil, hip firing or sighted in. Every gun is a sniper rifle.
The game is also very linear. There are invisible walls everywhere. Many times I tried to jump onto a building to get a good vantage point but ran into a wall instead, keeping me from a spot I could clearly see. The game feels like it ran out of money by the last mission. You shoot a mini gun which feels less intense than a super soaker.
Sound: 9/10
The sound is pretty good. The guns sound nice, and so does pretty much anything else you can find. There's not much to say, it's not too bad or amazing. Better than Bad Company 2 but not as good as Bad Company 1.
Graphics: 7/10
The graphics are good overall. They're not as good as Modern Warfare 2, but they're better than Bad Company 2. Besides the weapons and environments, there are plenty of problems. Graphical glitches make parts of buildings flicker in and out of existence, scripted explosions also flicker and look pretty bad. Most parts of the environment that can be destroyed just simply disappear, without even any smoke to mask the transition. The frame rate also drops to a crawl during heavy parts, especially on the last mission where my game nearly froze it was going so slow.
Multiplayer: 8/10
The maps are pretty good, but they are much more linear than BC2 or even CoD maps. There are invisible walls everywhere, you can just be trying to flank the enemy and run into an invisible barrier blocking you from going somewhere you can clearly see. This even happens in bounds, when you might want to jump over a fence or something or get on top of a building but you have a wall blocking you.
The multiplayer also suffers from a lack of guns. The weapons you get are dependant on if youre playing as the taliban or US forces. You can be either rifleman, spec ops or sniper. The Rifleman gets an M16/AK47, 40mm attached launcher, and smoke grenades. If you play well you can unlock an M249/PKM depending on what side you're on. At the later levels you can unlock an F2000 which can be used on either side. You unlock red dot sites, suppressors, extra mag perks, etc. as well.
This goes for all of the classes. Basically you play as a class and can only use the weapon specific to that side, then you unlock attachments for it, then unlock a second weapon later, then you unlock the talibans weapon for use on the american team and vice versa, then another last weapon which can be used on either side. So ultimately there's about 3 unique weapons per the classes.
The snipers seem overpowered. I get one hit killed all the time, but I haven't used them yet so i'm not sure if it requires a headshot. There's travel time and no bullet drop. Ultimately you can snipe with any gun. The accuracy is pinpoint and there doesn't seem to be any effect on the gun for range, so I can pick people off at a hundred yards with an AK-47 red dot with a half second pause between shots. There's also not much recoil for hip shooting. The reticule stays at the fairly accurate whether standing still, walking, or shooting.
Most of the cool features from singleplayer like double tapping for your sidearm, single shot vs full auto, the gore, and night vision are also gone from multiplayer. On some maps there's a bradley ripped straight out of BC2 which spawns for the US forces, only the enemy team can't get in it, you can't repair it, and there's only a main gunner and turret gunner.
Overall 7/10, the game is good but parts feel very unfinished. It could have been much better by just allowing more weapons to be found and used in the singleplayer, getting rid of some invisible walls, and fixing the travel time, and polishing some other features.
Presentation 9/10: First off, the scope of this game is a little refreshing. No Russians invading, no Nazis, no undercover conspiracy theories, just an attempt at realism. The game follows some Navy Seals and Army Rangers through a battle in the Middle East war with the Taliban. You play a variety of missions through large scale firefights with insurgents to special ops navy seals raiding villages, to marking targets for an AC-130 to destroy, controlling the weapons of an Apache, and super long range sniping across mountain tops. At times the game is a little too scripted, but this is somewhat necessary for the atmosphere. The characters are a mixture of goofy Battlefield Bad Company attitudes and GI Joe serious from Bad Company. What's good is that they're human. One character is impatient, one is a soft spoken and professional soldier, and one is even a backwards hat, wearing long-bearded, and sunglasses bearing guy named Dusty who probably doesn't play in a band called ZZ Top. There's also some nice cutscenes to help flesh out some of the characters and the plot. The menus look decent enough, you know where to go when the game starts up. Campaign or Multiplayer. Lets start with campaign.
Gameplay: 7/10
The singleplayer is good enough, but very short. I beat it in one day, about 2 hours when I came home and another 2 before I went to bed, on hard mode. Despite this, what you do play is pretty fun. There are a lot of good features to the game. Your fellow soldiers can give you ammo, you can switch between single shot or full auto for many guns, double tapping Y will switch to your sidearm (A welcome feature from other games where a sidearm = another assault rifle you can pick up) meaning you can carry two guns and still have an emergency pistol, the reload animations are accurate depending on if you empty your magazine or not and ammo per gun, etc, there is appropriate gore for shooting someone in the head point blank with a shotgun or 50. cal sniper rifle, and nightvision is available whether you need it or not. There are also a few stealth scenes, which work well enough.
There are plenty of problems despite this. Hit detection is wonky, especially with grenades. Grenades in this game like to bounce off of invisible walls and kill you. There's also an attempt at bullet travel time, which equates to working at long range, but taking half a second to hit a target at point blank range. There's also a frustrating lack of guns to use. You usually start a mission with two American guns, which you will pretty much have to use the entire mission. Enemies will only drop AK47s, AKS47us, or RPKs. Rarely you will find an RPG or an insurgent sniper rifle with maybe a dozen rounds to use, in fact most weapons you find on the battlefield with have 20 or less rounds. There are more guns in the game, it includes an MP7, M4, M14 EBR, M24, M249, M60, and G3, but you usually will not be able to use more than one of them per mission. Even if you find a lot of other weapons on the ground that your allies or enemies were using, the game doesn't let you pick them up. It's also annoying that enemies can kill you in one shot with an RPG from behind cover. There's also pretty much no recoil, hip firing or sighted in. Every gun is a sniper rifle.
The game is also very linear. There are invisible walls everywhere. Many times I tried to jump onto a building to get a good vantage point but ran into a wall instead, keeping me from a spot I could clearly see. The game feels like it ran out of money by the last mission. You shoot a mini gun which feels less intense than a super soaker.
Sound: 9/10
The sound is pretty good. The guns sound nice, and so does pretty much anything else you can find. There's not much to say, it's not too bad or amazing. Better than Bad Company 2 but not as good as Bad Company 1.
Graphics: 7/10
The graphics are good overall. They're not as good as Modern Warfare 2, but they're better than Bad Company 2. Besides the weapons and environments, there are plenty of problems. Graphical glitches make parts of buildings flicker in and out of existence, scripted explosions also flicker and look pretty bad. Most parts of the environment that can be destroyed just simply disappear, without even any smoke to mask the transition. The frame rate also drops to a crawl during heavy parts, especially on the last mission where my game nearly froze it was going so slow.
Multiplayer: 8/10
The maps are pretty good, but they are much more linear than BC2 or even CoD maps. There are invisible walls everywhere, you can just be trying to flank the enemy and run into an invisible barrier blocking you from going somewhere you can clearly see. This even happens in bounds, when you might want to jump over a fence or something or get on top of a building but you have a wall blocking you.
The multiplayer also suffers from a lack of guns. The weapons you get are dependant on if youre playing as the taliban or US forces. You can be either rifleman, spec ops or sniper. The Rifleman gets an M16/AK47, 40mm attached launcher, and smoke grenades. If you play well you can unlock an M249/PKM depending on what side you're on. At the later levels you can unlock an F2000 which can be used on either side. You unlock red dot sites, suppressors, extra mag perks, etc. as well.
This goes for all of the classes. Basically you play as a class and can only use the weapon specific to that side, then you unlock attachments for it, then unlock a second weapon later, then you unlock the talibans weapon for use on the american team and vice versa, then another last weapon which can be used on either side. So ultimately there's about 3 unique weapons per the classes.
The snipers seem overpowered. I get one hit killed all the time, but I haven't used them yet so i'm not sure if it requires a headshot. There's travel time and no bullet drop. Ultimately you can snipe with any gun. The accuracy is pinpoint and there doesn't seem to be any effect on the gun for range, so I can pick people off at a hundred yards with an AK-47 red dot with a half second pause between shots. There's also not much recoil for hip shooting. The reticule stays at the fairly accurate whether standing still, walking, or shooting.
Most of the cool features from singleplayer like double tapping for your sidearm, single shot vs full auto, the gore, and night vision are also gone from multiplayer. On some maps there's a bradley ripped straight out of BC2 which spawns for the US forces, only the enemy team can't get in it, you can't repair it, and there's only a main gunner and turret gunner.
Overall 7/10, the game is good but parts feel very unfinished. It could have been much better by just allowing more weapons to be found and used in the singleplayer, getting rid of some invisible walls, and fixing the travel time, and polishing some other features.
