Medal of Honor Review

You play as Rabbit as well as other roles throughout the campaign and you are pretty much always with a team/squad of four people or at least you and someone else.  This Medal of Honor cannot and should not be compared to any of the previous Medal of Honor games before it. It is set in current/modern times.  This game is its own stand alone Medal of Honor that is unique to other first-person shooters.  During the campaign you can slide to cover while sprinting which is pretty cool and not normally an aspect in first-person shooters.  You can also go prone in the campaign which along with the slide to cover system, both cannot be done in multiplayer.  This is because separate game engines were used for single player and multiplayer.

Danger Close game developer decided to go with their own engine for the single player campaign where as they used the DICE engine, the same engine used in Battlefield: Bad Company 2.  I actually like the single player engine better and would rather had them use it for mutliplayer.  The campaign is short compared to most games.  You’re looking at five maybe six hours depending on the difficulty setting.  Although short, the campaign has its epic moments and the cinematics are very entertaining.  There is also Tier 1 mode for campaign which is set at high difficulty and you have a par time you must beat it in.  If that isn’t enough you also cannot die for the whole mission, if you die you start the level over again as there are no checkpoints in Tier 1 mode.

The multiplayer is very similar to the Bad Company multiplayer although at times felt like Modern Warfare 2 online fighting close quarters especially on some of the maps.  When it comes to classes you can only choose three and I think this was done purposely to strip down the game make it a good classic shooter where people are mostly having firefights.  Shooters have evolved so much lately that there is less shooting going and more of some other new aspect that has been put in to a game like all the kill streaks in Modern Warfare 2.  There are kill streak rewards in this game but they are well deserved and really not over powering.  “Kill Streak Rewards” is not the right term for them as you can have no kills but as long as you have the required points in one life for the reward you can use them.  You can get seven rewards within one life without dying or use a support streak instead which can be a UAV, Full Metal Jacket ammo for your whole team, flak armor for your team, counter intelligence and more.  The streak rewards are as follows:

• Level 1 – Mortar Strike(50 Points)
• Level 2 – Rocket Attack(100 Points)
• Level 3 – Missile Attack(175 Points)
• Level 4 – Artillery Strike(250 Points)
• Level 5 -Strafing Run(350 Points)
• Level 6 – Air Strike(450 Points)
• Level 7 – Cruise Missile(600 Points)

Once reaching those points without dying also gives you the option of using a support action instead.

An aspect that really adds to the multiplayer are the different modes you can play online which are ‘Team Assault’ (Team Death-match), ‘Combat Mission’ where a team must attack or defend a point on the map, upon destruction of a point, the defending team is pushed back to another defense point and once they are all destroyed, the attacking team wins, much like ‘Rush’ in Bad Company 2.  There is also ‘Sector Control’ which is self explanatory where there are usually 3 points on the map that your team must try and control for as long as possible, like ‘Domination’ in Call of Duty.  In ‘Objective Raid’, you must defend two bombsites from the other team until you switch sides to attack the bombsites and lastly is ‘Hardcore’ mode which takes away your HUD, has no health regeneration and it’s pretty much one shot kill while the it cycles through all the different game modes randomly.  You can also choose ‘Any Mode’ which is self explanatory.

A downside to the multiplayer are all the invisible walls which are also in the campaign and will get you killed.  Terrain gives you the perception you can scale it when you can’t in many different areas of almost all the maps.  There are smoke grenades which are handy using it with your team in the objective modes.  You can level up all three of classes to level 15 unlocking something new every time you level up.  You can also obtain ribbons and medals for completing certain tasks which gives you points to level.  Every kill you get gives you 10 points with a head shot giving you an extra 5 points as well as revenge and savior kill.

Medal of Honor is a good game and unique with two engines used in one game.  The online is great if you are a first-person shooter fan but with it being released so close to the next Call of Duty game, which has been the dominant FPS, it just seems that the time of its release really will effect the game because your not going to have certain people playing this game with Halo Reach just being released and Call of Duty: Black Ops coming in less than a month.  So overall, good game – bad timing.

This game was reviewed on the Xbox 360.