Sunday, October 17, 2010

Not a Headshot(Medal of Honor Review)

            Medal of Honor is a name that has been in First Person Shooters for all most as long as there have been First Person Shooters.  People have been playing these war themed games for a long time.  In the good old days these games were based in the conflicts of World War 2.  Over time however, these games were surpassed in their quality and ability to represent these conflicts by Call of Duty.  Which is, ironic, considering the same people who created Medal of Honor went on to make it’s successor Call of Duty.

          Now Electronic Arts, with the help of Danger Close and DICE have decided to make; yet another Medal of Honor.  Again, they aren’t working with the people who originally made Medal of Honor.  Because THEY are now working for their own company, Respawn.  Perhaps they should have consulted on this one.

          The campaign component of Medal Of Honor is pretty good.  The Medal of Honor campaign is split up into 3 major parts.  Which follows three different teams, these guys are both Tier 1 operators and Army Rangers.  All of these areas are good, in fact most of the campaign; while very reminiscent of other games of it’s type is very good.  The problems I had with it were mainly the very large number of game crashing bugs.  Most involved the player not being in the right spot or in some cases the A.I. not responding correctly.  They occurred for me around four times in my play through.  But given the circumstances of the crashes; I would say they would happen over and over unless the player knew how it occurred and how to fix it.

    I certainly enjoyed the story; but I would have preferred they had stick to one team and not worry about trying to show something that didn’t need to be seen from many sides from many sides.  The split stories bring little, if anything to the overall game.  I guess this does allow the player to decide which story they like the best.  But I think a more fleshed out main character might have solved this issue.

  

    While I really enjoyed most of the running single player.  I have to say that the Multiplayer was both less ambitious and less interesting.  Where the single player has some patchable problems, the multiplayer seems irrevocably worthless.  DICE has basically taken their incredible Battlefield Bad Company 2 and stripped out all of what makes it important.  The current multiplayer of Medal of Honor is simply Modern Warfare without the long list of perks, weapons, and upgrades.  As it stands now, it is not interesting or different.  It’s just a bunch of players shooting each other back and forth until one side wins.  All of the modes are certainly surpassed in their elegance by Battlefield and in their creativity both in level design and finesse by Modern Warfare 2.  For some reason in trying to recreate or out do, Modern Warfare 2 it appears that Danger Close has simply created a poor imitation. 

   There certainly is plenty of history, both from the old days and from the recent few years.  While Danger Close and DICE certainly tried to deliver identical experiences to those that have been delivered recently it seems that some more time was needed to work out the bugs.  And perhaps, Battlefield Bad Company 2 should have had a good enough multiplayer for anyone.  Let us not forget about Modern Warfare 2 while we are at it; which is STILL the best of all possible modern era FPS games.  While this might not all ways be the case, it will be at least for the near future.

2 comments:

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