Medal of Honor (PC)

The final 'M' game I'm playing this year is Medal of Honor, not to be confused with Medal of Honor, despite the fact that it's by the same people and has the exact same damn name. Actually you should get the games confused, teach EA a lesson.

Medal of Honor 2010 seems to have acquired a bit of a bad reputation, possibly because it dropped the franchise's World War 2 setting after 11 years of gunning down Nazis to follow the Call of Duty series and become yet another charmless grey Modern Warfare clone. Or maybe it's just crap. Either way it probably isn't an ideal candidate for my site, but I've seen it get so much hate over the last few years that I'm curious to see what exactly it's done to piss so many people off.

I'll only be playing the single player campaign I'm afraid, though I'm sure multiplayer also features gruff soldiers pulling off headshots with scoped M4A1 Carbines.

(Click the pics for double the resolution.)

Wow, yell at the innocent goat herder for daring to cross the road in his own town, that's going to endear your character to me. Plus the fact that I can't even turn my head during this unskippable cutscene is kind of putting me off too.

Okay, so here's the story so far: the game begins with a short scene of a helicopter going down in the mountains before jumping six months back to reveal that disembodied voices floating around the Earth are on to the fact that Al-Qaeda is planning something somewhere. I found it a little hard to follow this conversation though as their dialogue clips had been cut up and overlaid with news broadcasts mentioning that "it's a beautiful Tuesday morning here in the Big Apple" and that shit's gone down near the Pentagon.

Cut to our four operatives driving down a dusty road at 3am in a pair of white trucks. My best guess is that we're here to pull a Jack Bauer and find out where the bomb is before disaster happens back in the US.

We came to a town named Gardez in Afghanistan to meet up with a guy called Tariq (because he knows... something), but we ran into a group of unfriendly Chechens first and now our trucks are on fire and my screen's covered in blood. Fortunately though this is a post-Call of Duty 2 military shooter, so I'm blessed with a mutant gene that that gives me the power to heal from my injuries in mere seconds!

Oh by the way the game's gimmick is that we're elite Tier 1 Navy SEAL operatives, so we all have amazing beards to blend in with the locals. I gotta admit, it does work to make them stand out from the generic clean-cut army guys starring in every other military shooter ever.

Hey they've given me a gun... and agency! I can even turn my head now, this is amazing. My first objective is to fight back to the ambush site, which shouldn't be too hard to find as there's only one path here I can go down.

There's no tutorial level, so the game's teaching me the controls as I go. Use mouse to aim at the enemies running into cover down the street, bring up iron sights with the right mouse button, then press left mouse button to kill them with a single head shot each. That concludes basic training.


A HALF DOZEN ENEMIES LATER.

My goat herder hating buddy Voodoo lifted up a metal shutter leading into a nearby building then we ducked off the street and turned off the lights. I'm called Rabbit by the way (because I always carry a lucky rabbit's foot), and I'm as silent a protagonist as you're ever likely to meet.

I've got no complaints about the shooting so far, but it sure would be nice if I could see a little more of the enemies. They're smart enough not to give me a target until they're ready to shoot, so I have to keep my eyes open and wait for one of them to pop out before I can trade bullets. Or if I'm lucky enough to take a hit I can just follow the red 'you just got shot son' indicator on screen to point myself directly at the guy who fired at me and send a few rounds back his way.

Oh crap... a scripted event just blew up the floor from under me with an RPG! Of course I'll only have to wait two seconds for the bones in my legs to heal and... wait, oh shit, I just looked down to check and found that my dude has no legs! He just glides around the level like a floating arm holding a gun, this is really horrifying.

The floor collapse means I can't turn around and go back the way I came, but that's nothing new for the game. It really doesn't want me to give a damn about what came before, that's irrelevant now. All that ever matters is finding a wall to crouch behind and then shooting all the targets that pop up in the small area I'm in right now.

It looks quiet here, but if Voodoo's telling me to get in cover then it would probably behoove me to get my ass behind some sturdy brickwork sharpish. Preferably somewhere with a gap I can shoot out of. I'm sure that guy must have some kind of psychic talent, as he instinctively knows if an area's clear and he's never wrong.

Fortunately for me I also have a psychic power: I can tell when I'm aiming at one of my own guys so I won't accidentally blow one of their heads off by mistake. Well, not with bullets at least, but you know how grenades are...

Crap, I can heal from three or four hits no problem, but all it takes is one bastard to pop up and spray me with a few rounds too many like this and it's all over for me. The enemies don't have superhuman aim or reflexes, but if if I'm dumb enough to give five or six of them a clear shot at me at once they can gun me down like a firing squad in half a hummingbird's heartbeat. There no quick saves, but reasonably placed checkpoints do take a lot of the sting out of failure.

Well I guess Voodoo and I are going through this door and flanking a machine gun nest then.


SOME MORE SHOOTING LATER.

Man, Mother's even scarier than Voodoo is. Maybe there's a mirror around here somewhere I can use to check Rabbit's own epic beard. Though I should probably kick this door in first before I learn what Mother looks like when he's angry.

Actually there's been no time pressure to follow orders or complete objectives so far and I'm allowed to wander around doing what I feel like, but the path behind me always ends off being blocked off by something and there's nowhere else for me to go but exactly where they want me to be. There's no reward for exploration anyway and nothing around to collect, as my health recharges by itself and my team-mates give me an ammo refill if I ask them.

Hey, the game even has a cliché slow motion door breaching room clearing sequence!

In retrospect I think the developers wanted me to take out the guy holding Tariq hostage before the bloke behind him but I just shot them as I saw them. Fortunately my team soon burst in behind me to pick up my slack and that's the end of level 1.

Tariq soon proves his usefulness to us by giving us intel on the nearby Taliban and Al-Qaeda forces. He's pretty sure that they're up in the Shah-i-Kot valley, and that there's more of them there than we were expecting. A whole lot more.

Metaphorical boat status: insufficient.

Man that level was long, it must have taken me around half an hour to finish it in the end, including the two or three sections I had to replay due to lapses in concentration and skill. Not that I'm bored of the game already, I just think it's a surprising amount of play time for a level with no backtracking at all.


LEVEL 2: "BREAKING BAGRAM".



Sorry Voodoo, but I'm going to have to destroy what's left of your hearing now as it's rail shooter time! I'm not usually a fan of this kind of gameplay (as it's hard to scurry away to find more health kits when you're locked in a car), but I find these levels a lot more bearable when I have regenerating health. Plus it also helps that it's impossible to lose this section, at least on medium difficulty.

Yep, I gave it a second try without touching the mouse and everything played out exactly the same, with vehicles exploding as if I was shooting them. Sure I got shot plenty of times, but never enough to mortally wound poor Rabbit. Some people would consider this an outrage, but personally I think it works fine. Save the challenge for the regular gameplay sections I reckon, as having to replay exciting action scenes like this over and over due to player incompetence just drains the life out of them.

We're here to steal their airfield by the way. I've no idea how this relates to that intel we got at the end of level one though. Maybe we just need a place to land that metaphorical boat.


SOME SHOOTING LATER.

Right, apparently Bossman's passed me to Ugly 35 to call in CAS on the Front Gate. So I guess I'm supposed to point the laser at something and hold the mouse button then?

Well I can't drag the camera too far away from these towers so I'm guessing that it's the gate, but no amount of clicking or holding is doing anything. Man I really hate it when games throw in mandatory 'paint the target' mini-games. Let someone else on the team do it, I'm here to shoot blokes.

Oh now it's working. Target is marked with SOFLAM, Ugly 35 tallies my laser and is on approach. Boom, death rains from the sky and all is well. I guess.

Pictured in this screenshot: me shooting at an enemy standing behind a MiG-21 Fishbed. I only included it because I wanted to use the word 'Fishbed' really.

It's really rare to catch an enemy running around in the open like this and it's even rarer that I can hit them (they're not a huge target). Better to wait until everyone's behind boxes again so we can carry on with the shoot out properly.

Oh shit the game has a map! It's pretty much entirely useless because I can't zoom in, but at least it gives me some idea of what this place looks like. Lots of hangars and wrecked planes basically. Of course I can only follow a single path through it all, though at least I get to choose which side of the boxes I run around. Woo.


LOTS OF DEAD BAD GUYS LATER.

Well the good news is that we've seized the tower. The bad news is that the enemy is bringing tanks over to take it back. The worst news is that I have to use this bloody SOFLAM again to laser designate targets for precision air strikes.

This is the world's slowest turret minigame and it doesn't help that I can barely see what I'm meant to be shooting at. My team continually yelling in my ear that I'm doing it all wrong isn't helping either.

I concede that it all looks very realistic and the game has been all about aerial surveillance drones and air support since the start, but I really wish there was an option to hand this over to Voodoo and let him do it. This is anti-fun to me.

Alright, another mission down, another rendered cutscene.

The area commander has settled into his new HQ at that airfield we borrowed and is ready to coordinate more strikes by our Tier 1 SEAL teams. Unfortunately General Incompetence back home has other ideas and wants the commander to mobilise a battalion of Rangers to wipe out all Al-Qaeda and Taliban forces in the valley before they can escape to Pakistan. By the commander's reaction, I'm assuming this would be a dumb move.

So our SEALs have 24 hours to get the job done. I'm still not entirely sure what exactly we're doing in this country, but I'm sure the story will fill me in eventually.


LEVEL 3: "RUNNING WITH WOLVES..."

For this mission I'm playing as a guy called Deuce in another squad, and we're riding quad bikes! Well that works for me; clearing out the Taliban so we can race ATVs around in peace is a decent enough plot for a video game I reckon and I definitely can't think of a better reason to be out in this part of Afghanistan at night.

This is just like that bit in Half-Life 2 when I was racing down canals in my boat, except for the fact that nothing at all is happening here. Seriously, the most I've had to do is slow down and turn the lights off when we saw some trucks.


TWO MINUTES OF EXTREME STEALTH QUAD BIKING LATER.

Man, it's always nice when I'm actually allowed to choose which guy to shoot in these situations.

We're going soft for this mission, making no noise, raising no alarms, and trying not to kill anyone if we can help it. Yep, it's a SURPRISE STEALTH MISSION!

But I'd consider myself negligent if I didn't at least try to ignore my orders entirely and go in shooting, so I grabbed an AK from a fallen enemy and started making as much as noise as possible. Shockingly this alerts the whole base and they all come out to try to kill you. Then you just kill them all first and move on to the next task on the list, no one makes a big deal about it and no objectives are failed. Honestly, I was not expecting that level of freedom.

I'm not a huge fan of how scripted this all is and how I'm basically meant to be following step by step instructions from my buddy for the whole level as he tells me exactly where to go and when it's safe to creep around enemies. But on the other hand, my sidekick for this level is Dusty (the guy from the cover with the baseball cap and massive beard) and he's awesome, so I'm happy enough to follow his lead.

I wonder what Rabbit, Voodoo and friends are up to while we're doing this.


LEVEL 4: "DOROTHY'S A BITCH".

Oh no, not the SOFLAM again. Anything but this! I can barely even see the bloody enemies I'm meant to be aiming at. I wanna be in Dusty's team again. Let me play as Deuce, I promise I won't make any noise this time!

For 20 minutes this level was a reasonably enjoyable trek around the snowy mountains, shooting the occasional terrorist and watching Voodoo harass innocent goat herders. Sure I found a few scripting bugs along the way that left me locked in an area because the exit wouldn't open up, but restarting from the last checkpoint sorted that out.

I could really do without this laser designating mini-game though. Why does Reaper 31 get to shoot everyone, I'm supposed to be the one that shoots everyone!

Oh no you didn't. I may not like painting targets for it, but I've grown pretty fond of Reaper 31 and I'd appreciate it if you Taliban assholes didn't fire rockets at my aeroplane!

It's funny, back in Medal of Honor: Allied Assault my people kept getting slaughtered in every mission they turned up in. This time my squad seems to be basically immortal, and it's my air support I'm trying to keep alive.

'RPG' my friend yells, for the 15 thousandth time in the game so far. Yeah, thanks for that mate but I'm way ahead of you. The rockets flying across the sky were a pretty big clue. Man, rocket launchers are almost as common as AKs in this place.

Aw crap. Well I screwed up and didn't save the plane in time. It turn out that I suck at figuring out what a game wants me to do when I've got a time limit and I'm being yelled at to HURRY!

OH! They were yelling at me to pick up an RPG and use it on the guys shooting my plane! Well that makes more sense now.

And that concludes a fine morning spent taking out anti-aircraft defences up on a mountain.

Meanwhile, back at HQ, General Incompetence is getting pissed off hearing about what my awesome SEAL AFO teams have been up to and wants to know why his Rangers still aren't on the ground yet. The commander assures him that Special Forces N.C.O.s are currently leading capable Afghan forces into the fight against the terrorist forces... and about 20 seconds later the General has managed to intervene and get half of them blown up by friendly fire, with the rest fleeing the area. Well who needs local allies anyway?

Anyway, this means that the General has gotten his way and the Rangers will finally get their chance to show what they can do.

Oh dear, it would appear that sending Chinooks full of troops into an area without adequate intel has led to utter disaster. So that's why the General was portrayed as being an ignorant dick for just wanting to get his forces on the ground. You gotta find the enemy before you kill the enemy, it doesn't work so well the other way around.


LEVEL 5: "BELLY OF THE BEAST".

So now I'm playing as one of the surviving Ranger teams, trying to wipe out the ambushing forces to save the rest of our troops. I know I should be running to the house to check it out, but I just need to stand here for a minute or two first to take in the view. It's fine, the game always waits for me, it's not as needy as SOME military shooters I could mention.

Medal of Honor makes use of DICE's shiny new Frostbite engine, built to power their own Battlefield franchise, but weirdly it only uses it in multiplayer. The game's single player campaign was built by Danger Close instead (formerly Dreamworks, currently DICE Los Angeles) and what you're looking at here is actually running on Unreal Engine 3. What difference this makes I have no idea, I just thought that was strange. It seems to basically be two different games by two different developers in one package.

I'd get a screenshot of multiplayer to compare, but I can't be bothered installing it.

Oh shit, they used RPGs on me and now I'm forced to make a desperate last stand inside (then soon behind) the ruins of the rapidly disintegrating house.

So now I'm stuck behind a wall, shooting at barely visible figures creeping to surround me on either side, without being allowed an ammo refill. Will my unlucky team of Rangers meet their demise here? I'm guessing... no, as every time my dude is shot dead I'm brought back to the last checkpoint instead of witnessing their tragic end. Fate demands that we win this one so I have to push through the tedium and keep going!


LEVEL 6: "GUNFIGHTERS".

After hiding behind a wall sniping enemies for 8 hours (well, more like 8 minutes, but that's actually an eternity to be stuck in one place in an FPS like this), I've been allowed to stretch my legs a bit... in a helicopter rail shooter level! Man if I wasn't sick of shooting at blokes with RPGs before, I am now.

This level's interesting though as it's the first one in the game where I'm fighting alongside a female character. In fact she's the first woman to show up in the game at all, besides General Incompetence's assistant, who didn't exactly get a speaking role. His real name's Flagg by the way, seriously.


LEVEL 7: "FRIENDS FROM AFAR".

Well after sitting in an Apache gunship for quarter of an hour shooting at targets, I get to stretch my legs a bit... right after I've finished this sniping level!

The hardest bit here is spotting the each target in the trees, even with my sidekick calling them out, but fortunately the game takes pity on me and shows a little marker pointing me towards it after a few seconds. In fact I have to wonder if it's even possible to spot the guys without the marker.

Fortunately I'm back to playing as Deuce and working with Dusty's team again on this level, so we deal with every situation with calm competence and skill. You can bet these two wouldn't yell at a goat-herder crossing the street.


LEVEL 9: "NEPTUNE'S NET".

Meanwhile Rabbit's having a tiny bit of trouble. First he failed to get his team to safety aboard a Chinook after getting swarmed by enemy troops, and then he messed up even worse on a return trip to rescue them. It turns out that taking a Chinook back into an area that you know is swarming with RPG wielding hostiles is probably a bad idea, but hey at least now we know not to do that again.

Nice fire effects though.


LEVEL 10: "RESCUE THE RESCUERS".

That chapter title up there is basically the last few levels in this game in one sentence. The Ranger team who got their Chinooks shot down in level 5 have been sent in to rescue Rabbit who got his Chinook shot down in level 9 trying to rescue his team. And guess what, their Chinook has gotten shot down!

Weren't we trying to stop some sort of terrorist plot about to take place in America at some point, or did I just imagine that? Does this game even have a point to it?

Anyway, a few more mountain shoot outs and another air strike later and we're ready to storm a cave and carry out a daring rescue attempt to save Rabbit!

Uh, what? That's it then? I go in the cave, get an ending video of yet another air strike on the mountain and that's the end of the entire game? 'Thank you for playing Medal of Honor, hope you didn't blink and miss it.'

I knew the game was going to be short, but I was expecting more of a story to emerge before the end, some kind of context to explain what we were doing and why I should care. Apparently we achieved what we set out to achieve though, so yay us. That's one mountain that won't threaten America again.

And then a Linkin Park track plays over the credits (youtube link).

Before I turn this off though I thought should investigate the mysterious 'Tier 1 Mode'. I thought this was the multiplayer part of the game at first as it asked me to log in to the servers before it'd even start, but it's actually a challenge mode. Here I can replay levels to try to beat my previous scores and improve my ranking.

The twist is that the levels are played on the hardest difficulty, without checkpoints or free ammo refills, and I've got a strict time limit on top of that. It's a good feature for people who breezed through the game effortlessly and are looking for something that'll actually test them, though 25 minute long levels are going to be a pain in the ass to replay.


CONCLUSION

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Okay here's what I think about Medal of Honor (2010 Edition) after one playthrough: It's pretty good, I liked it. For the most part anyway. It's only about five hours long and it wants to be a Modern Warfare game so badly, but I found it to be less frustrating than those games. I was never forced to march forward against infinite respawning enemies, and I didn't feel like I was trapped on a short leash, forced to play along in someone else's action movie. In fact I tried replaying the first part of the game like a lunatic, running towards enemies with a pistol and was surprised when it actually worked. I even found new paths I didn't notice first time around and was able to sneak up and flank terrorists instead of waiting for them to pop out of cover. This has the single player gameplay that Battlefield 3 wishes it had.

I did a little research after finishing the game to try to get my head around the plot, and remember when I said a news clip during the intro mentioned that it was 'a beautiful Tuesday morning in the Big Apple'? Well, Sept 11th 2001 took place on a Tuesday. It turns out that this is a historical game like the rest of the Medal of Honor series, except it's set during the Afghanistan War in 2002 rather than World War II, and I managed to complete the entire game without having any idea. It's based on actual events that took place during the Battle of Takur Ghar, though it's like they stripped out all the references to this at some point, leaving the story floating without any context. It's a shame really, because the cutscenes look great and the voice acting is top quality.

Don't get me wrong, it's not a particularly awesome shooter and I don't think it even comes close to matching the gameplay of something like Call of Duty 2, but I can't say that I didn't enjoy it. At times. Plus I actually kind of like that Linkin Park song, so the game gets a star.

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Here's a fun fact, you just spent longer reading through my text than it takes to finish the game! If you have anything you want to say about Medal of Honor, military shooters, or all that stuff I just wrote about them, you're welcome to leave a comment in the box below.

Hey, if this is the last M game that means that I'm halfway through my year long alphabetical order gimmick now. Only another six months to go. Six long months.