I was never excited about the new modern "Medal of Honor." I agreed with analysts at the time that the game would be meeting stiff competition with "Halo: Reach" being released at around the same time and "Call of Duty: Black Ops" just around the corner. It had no reason to exist, predictably did not meet sales expectations, and was sure to be just another mediocre modern-warfare shooter.
That is, until I played it.
This game is not just mediocre, it's downright terrible. The single-player campaign is an unpolished mess, the multiplayer is a horribly unbalanced sniper-fest, and the requisite co-op survival mode or any fitting replacement is completely absent. It's an overall poorly-made, lackluster package that fails to meet up to the standard of other cut-rate CoD knockoffs.
Where else should I take my first bite into this shit sandwich than with the campaign. There was real effort to make everything you do here accurate to real-life military operations, and the whole thing is set around a real military campaign in Afghanistan. This realistic tone clashes with the high-octane setpiece-action gameplay that dominates the game as part of its obligation to be just like Call of Duty, and there are parts where the game wholesale copies sequences from Call of Duty but cannot make them as interesting due to their obligation to be realistic to real-world procedures. Pick one and stick with it, Medal of Honor, these things don't mix well.
It's a fairly petty gripe, and one that is easily resolved through changing the settings, but the default controller sensitivity is very low. It's cumbersome to switch between different targets when the reticule doesn't move any quicker than a slow crawl. R.O.B. the Robot turns quicker than your guy on the default setting, and when you're in marking-targets-for-airstrikes mode, it's like R.O.B.'s batteries are dying. THIS IS NOT REALISTIC, MEDAL OF HONOR. Guns move quicker than this.
Also, please give me a clear indicator of how close I am to dying. You know how in Call of Duty the screen turns all red when you're about to die? That's a good thing: it lets you know right away that you need to take cover. Sure, there is a little red fringe around the screen in Medal of Honor, but it stays to the sides like it doesn't want to interrupt you. Believe me, the news that I will die if I take another hit is important enough to warrant telling me. Again, back to realism: In real life, you can tell very easily if you are about to die. I know you can't replicate excruciating pain and blood loss in your game, but that's why you use another system to tell me.
Don't even get me started on the graphics. The single-player uses a modified version of Unreal Engine 3, which doesn't even begin to make sense since they packed in the much more advanced Frostbite Engine for the multiplayer. Unreal Engine 3, really? I could make a game in Unreal Engine 3. I know you "heavily modified" it, but it seems that by "heavily modify" you meant "break."
I'll sum up all my issues with the graphics with one little instance. There's a scene where you are hiding behind a hill and a goat comes right up in your face. At least I think it was a goat, you can't really tell when the textures take 5 minutes to pop in. I can't describe fully how terrible this thing looked, but I'll just say that the sheep in Minecraft look more realistic. This was obviously a chance to show off how detailed the textures were, but it was totally ruined when the showing-off subject looked like an amorphous polygon-laden white blob.
This ... is ... inexcusable. This is just unacceptable. You just don't ship a game out like this, much less a big-budget fall blockbuster game. It's broken when it has no right nor excuse to be. Whoever QA tested this over at EA should be fired immediately.
Okay, moving on to the multiplayer. The multiplayer is actually okay: it's functional and looks really nice with the much more stable Frostbite Engine. Yet again, though, it has no right to exist. The map design and gameplay are just like Call of Duty with no improvements other than it being built on a better game engine. It tries to do nothing new, and makes no effort to separate itself from its competitors. It's also severely lacking in features, only including three classes and minimal upgrades.
What really puts the nail in the coffin, though, is how unbalanced it is. Sniping is ridiculously easy: no scope-steadying like in Call of Duty and no windage to worry about like in Bad Company 2, just point and shoot. There are also no killcams, so a sniper can rack up dozens of kills with no one knowing where the bastard is. Overall, it's heavily biased towards camping and sniping, and if you're on the receiving end, it can be terribly frustrating.
The game sucks, simple as that, and I feel sorry for anyone who paid full price for it.
4 comments:
It's a slow and painful death to a unwanted resurrection of an old favorite of mine. I still have my original Playstation; I still have Medal of Honor and Medal of Honor: Underground, and I even have Medal of Honor: Frontline for the Xbox. (Not that it was all that great....) EA really doesn't give any noticeable consideration to it's players as far as we know. They pump out the games like no tomorrow with little care to whether they will be enjoyed, seeming to only care about making a profit. I avoid EA whenever possible.
Quite frankly, I have the new one and played it...it was decent enough...I still prefer the old medal of honors especially the one with the German lessons :p
Maybe I colored my experience of the game crappy by playing the single-player first, but the campaign is just too poorly made to be excuseable. The multiplayer's infinitely better, but getting head-shot by the same damn sniper 200 times did not improve matters.
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