MilGames: Medal of Honor Impressions

Hello again, dear readers. It's Guardian here again. I've been really busy with both work and personal life for the past several months, but I have several article ideas queued up on topics ranging from games to the old standbys on guns and gear. Let's begin with some quick impressions of Medal of Honor, the controversial new release from Electronic Arts that portrays the early days of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan.

I'm playing the Xbox 360 version and these impressions are based on finishing the single-player campaign and playing about 4 hours of on-line multi-player over Xbox Live this weekend.

Pros:

• Single-player campaign is very good, with clearly focused and well-balanced missions. Personally, I think MoH's single-player campaign is better balanced and focused than Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (MW2), which sometimes left me wondering exactly what I was supposed to do or re-trying over and over to defeat overwhelming enemy forces.
• Some of the set-piece sequences in the single-player campaign really leave an impression. Watching my SEAL swim buddy sneak up on a group of terrorists and take them out in a sequence of quick, well-aimed shots from a suppressed pistol was a sight to behold.
• The multi-player game is fairly well-balanced in terms of action vs. thought. Like the quickly-aging Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (BC2), MoH is a thinking man's tactical shooter, much more so than CoD: MW2.
• The various multi-player game modes, while not particularly innovative, are fun and bring some tactical structure to the experience.

Cons:

• The single-player campaign is short, only about 6 hours. I can tell a game is short when my wife sees the credits roll on the second night I have the game and asks "That was it?"
• There's a definite WTF moment in the game: General Flagg, a desk jockey back in CONUS who keeps trying to micro-manage your Task Force commander's fight, wears a business suit. No general officer I've ever met wears a business suit on duty, no matter how much of a REMF he is.
• The multi-player game doesn't have a "hard-core mode" like BC2 (if it does and I missed it, somebody post a comment and clue me in). When I was on BC2 a lot, I played hard-core mode exclusively: weapons damage was more realistic (i.e., deadly). This, in turn, raised the stakes for getting shot just enough to slow the game down a bit. It also tended to separate the men from the boys: mature, serious players tend to play hard-core, while 12 year-old run-and-gunners hyped up on Mountain Dew tended not to.
• The multi-player game does not have quite the tactical depth of BC2. In particular, there are no squads, no squad objectives, no command-and-control system, no points for being on the winning team, etc. All of this leaves too much tactical coordination up to the players, which is a mixed bag for those of us who have other things to do in our lives other than be part of an organized clan/squad. In the Xbox Live sessions I've played, there has also been zero meaningful communication. There's far less chatter than on MW2, which is a good thing, but what communication I've heard is along the lines of "Damnit, he got me." Nobody calls contacts, announces their intentions, or anything else.
• Personally, I found the Apache gunship mission in the single-player campaign to be a distraction from the core focus of the game on light-infantry/special ops ground combat. That said, if EA or one of the other big publishers would like to reboot the old PC classic Gunship franchise from Microprose or the Jane's/EA co-branded Longbow simulation on current PC and console platforms, I'll pre-order it the day that you announce it. Heck, I'll pre-order two copies so I can fly while my son plays co-pilot/gunner.

Bottom-line: MoH's single-player game is really engaging and well-balanced, but a little short. On the multi-player front, I have to look at MoH in terms of its competition. BC2 is getting stale because EA/DICE haven't released any new maps for quite a while. MW2 is just too hyper-active and over-the-top for me and I'm afraid Call of Duty: Black Ops is going to be the same way. Although it doesn't really advance the genre and, in some ways, is actually a step backward from BC2, MoH is going to be my tactical shooter of choice for a while. I doubt CoD: Black Ops will displace it but maybe Ghost Recon: Future Soldier will. Battlefield 3 is coming next year and I'm very hopeful about it, but that's a long time to wait without a fresh fix of tactical action.

By: Guardian