THE GAMEPLAY
As has already been said before, there’s probably more to the decision to set the game in modern day Afghanistan than a simple matter of aesthetics and setting the game apart from the crowd. The conflict in Afghanistan, which involves a new breed of warfare with elusive insurgents in the area, could lead potentially to an all new style of gameplay that could lead to the FPS genre being revitalized all over again.
Unfortunately, we’ve played the beta, we know what the game is like, and we know for sure that Medal of Honor isn’t going to be the kind of revolution that the paragraph above might suggest it to be. Instead, we are talking about a game that seems to extremely refined, and yet, one that seems to lack an identity of its own as far as the gameplay setup is concerned. The game is a conflicted mish mash of Call of Duty and Battlefield, and so far, we simply have little reason to believe that such a mix will go down well. If anything, this game risks facing the same crisis that did its immediate predecessors in- that of being a well made game, that is too generic to actually be remarkable in any degree.
What about the multiplayer setup, though? If DICE is working on it, then it has to be something special, right? Right?
Well, yes, it looks good. However, there’s a small problem which might lead to several people simply avoiding what might be an excellently crafted multiplayer shooter simply on principle (and they won’t be wrong if they do so, by the way)- this game allows you to play as Taliban in the multiplayer mode.
Think about that for a moment. Let it sink in.
Would you still want to play the multiplayer mode?
Beyond the immediate controversy, what we have seems to be the standard DICE fare- in other words, a multiplayer shooter that is well beyond most others on the market. Again, while there seems to be a high level of finesse and polish to the multiplayer mode, from whatever we’ve seen so far, it doesn;t look like it will be truly groundbreaking, or that it will really do anything all that different. The cliche I’d want to use in this situation would be that the game will be an evolution, not a revolution, but I frankly doubt that it’s gonna be mixed and matched up enough for it to even be called an evolution at all.
Medal of Honor is an enigma- by all rights, it should be a great game. It has some of the most talented developers in the industry at its helm, it’s centred around an all new style of gunplay that could lend itself to endless possibilities, it seems to be very promising from the trailers. But from whatever we’ve seen ourselves, the game looks to be too generic and seems to be lacking an identity of its own for it to truly stick out in memory. Say what you will about the Call of Duty games, but those games reek personality, something that helps them be remembered properly over time, and something that this game, so far at least, seems to lack sorely.
We recognize that we haven’t got the final product in our hands yet. Therefore, we’re hoping that our impressions right now are incorrect and inaccurate, that we’ve got the wrong picture. Because, trust me, what we want right now more than anything else is a true competitor for Call of Duty. There’s too much of a monopoly otherwise, in the market, and the genre is just too stagnant.
