The hard lesson EA is about to learn with Medal of Honor is that it takes more than a pair of sunglasses and an excellent beard to compete with the likes of Call of Duty. EA has whipped up a hell of a marketing campaign and has voiced confidence that their attempt to reboot their flagship military franchise will overtake Activision at some point over the next couple of years, but all the money in the world can’t buy an FPS more tight and polished than anything else on the market. And if you’re taking on Call of Duty, that’s exactly what you’re up against.
So let’s just get this out of the way: Medal of Honor is no Call of Duty. It’s not a bad game by any means, but it doesn’t look as good, it doesn’t play as fluidly, and it lacks the wealth of multiplayer options that has given Activision’s blockbuster series so much lasting value. That last point is especially damning, because while a solo experience will always have the benefit of a unique plot and scripted events that can only be provided through a linear and carefully-guided campaign, dominating the multiplayer market is a matter of either doing it differently than everyone else, or doing it better. Why would I want to run around shooting people in this game if I can have more fun running around shooting people in another game?
To their credit, developer DICE did try to distinguish the multiplayer mode from Call of Duty’s zippy, twitch-based play style by combining it with the more methodical approach of their own Battlefield series. Surprisingly, it doesn’t work. Multiplayer is entirely team-based, but the four game types are too inherently simplistic to make teamwork worth the struggle. Despite only one deathmatch mode, nearly every Medal of Honor match I’ve participated in has played out like a free-for-all, even in the presence of actual objectives.
I wish I could merely point the finger at the community for this, but the real problem is that the maps are all so visually busy that it’s often a better strategy to simply camp in one spot than to run around manually looking for kills amidst the overachieving level design. Medal of Honor’s online experience is a sniper’s paradise, and that works against both the focus on teamwork and the relentlessly fast pace that Call of Duty pulls off so well, and that this game tries to mimic. It’s also worth noting that the respawn system is a mess, as the game will often drop you next to a teammate regardless of where that player is or what he’s doing. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been killed within a second or two of respawning.
Medal of Honor noticeably lacks the flexibility of its counterpart, with only three classes and an incredibly bare-bones level-up system. There’s also no local multiplayer, which will never be excusable, especially when a healthy chunk of my gaming life over the past year has been spent sitting around a single TV playing split-screen Modern Warfare 2 with a few of my friends. If anything sealed the deal that Medal of Honor’s multiplayer isn’t here to stay, it’s that.
Still, more so than most of the people who play games like these, I’m a sucker for a good single-player campaign, and Medal of Honor has one. I’ve heard complaints that the story sort of comes and goes with little in the way of plotting, climax or character development, but that’s exactly what I like about it. The campaign was designed by a separate team called Danger Close, and taking into consideration their risky decision to set the game in Afghanistan, their grounded, straight-faced approach to the game’s story is unquestionably the right one. After suffering through the absurdity of Modern Warfare 2’s plot, it’s refreshing to experience a military operation in a video game that actually feels like it could be happening right now.
It’s not a bad set of missions, either, with Danger Close juggling your standard pop-and-shoot gunfights with some excellent novelty sequences, such as when you’re painting targets for artillery fire or mowing down Taliban insurgents from the seat of an Apache gunfighter. The missions that have you rigidly following orders from your AI-controlled squad mates bear an eerie resemblance to the Chernobyl flashback from the first Modern Warfare, and they’re an excellent example of how linear, heavily scripted level design can work in a game’s favor.
It’s still not great, though. It lacks the wall-to-wall intensity of the Call of Duty games, which isn’t a huge problem in and of itself, but proves fatal when you finish the campaign in under five hours. I’m a firm believer that a game can get away with being short if it fills the time, but Medal of Honor doesn’t even come close to doing that. There’s a fantastic sequence in which you and three other Army Rangers are surrounded by dozens of insurgents and trapped in a hut that’s slowly being whittled away by RPGs, and the growing intensity as your cover slowly disappears and your ammo supply runs dry is absolutely unreal. Medal of Honor needed more instances like that, but most of the time, it’s just a regular old military game – sufficient and often pretty fun, but also unspectacular.
Where Danger Close sort of makes up for it is in the inclusion of Tier 1 Mode, which has you replaying the single-player missions with an array of handicaps, no checkpoints, and a time limit. It’s absolutely grueling and probably doubles or triples the campaign’s play time, which solves the problem of Medal of Honor being both too short and too easy. The catch is that you’ll need to finish the campaign once to unlock the mode, but it’s a worthwhile incentive to replay the game if you’re up for the challenge.
It doesn’t offset the lackluster multiplayer experience, though, and that’s the problem. It really feels like EA was trying to bring fans of Call of Duty and Battlefield into one place, but I think both camps will stay right where they are. The single-player mode is all I can recommend, but it doesn’t have nearly enough meat on its bones to stand up to a full purchase. Provided you’re not yet sick of this brand of shooter, Medal of Honor is worth a rental and nothing more. You’ll get all you need out of the game in only a few days, and it’ll help pass the time until Black Ops is released in a couple of weeks and Medal of Honor is inevitably forgotten.
Rating: C
