Review | Medal of Honor

Electronic Arts and Danger Close Studios tried to breathe new life into the Medal of Honor franchise by rebooting and reimagining the series as a modern military shooter. Despite having a few highlights, Medal of Honor simply has too many problems in its design and presentation to adequately compete against other franchises in the genre.

Medal of Honor is really two separate games, each having their own look and feel. The single player – made and designed by Danger Close – is a short experience that has only a few interesting and well made set pieces. The game places the player into the perspective of a Navy Seal, an Army Ranger, and the heavily marketed Tier 1 operative. The game presents a battle from the eyes of soldiers who all should have distinct methods and means to wage their own brand of war. Instead of featuring the nuance and methods of each individual, the game’s encounter design is always the same regardless of perspective or tactical scenario: splinter off and push forward. Remnants of the old Medal of Honor one-man-army remain. There is never an encounter that isn’t fought with more that three AI controlled allies. The sense of scale is lost as encounters vary from simple hanger kill-rooms to the even more uninteresting carnival-like shooting gallery Afghan foothills.

With the encounter design being simple in nature, the way in which the game moves from level to level is particularly well thought out. While assuming the role of an Army Ranger, the level ends in Alamo-esque fashion as you and your three-squad mates have to hold off a Taliban offensive. Just after air cavalry saves the day for you and your Rangers, the game’s perspective shifts to the Apache helicopters. After a few air raids on Taliban mortar placements and enclaves, a team of Tier 1 snipers saves your Apache squadron from would be attackers. The perspective shifts again, allowing the player to assume the role of the Tier 1 team. This ‘tag you are it’ method of shifting perspective is an interesting take on how to tell a complex experiential narrative. Unfortunately, that four level segment is so stylistically dissimilar from the rest of the game that it highlights the chapters that bookend the game as being cut from a different cloth – one that is uninteresting and forgettable.

The mechanics and map design of multiplayer is designed well enough not to be abhorrently bad. For the most part, the multiplayer plays rather smoothly – a noticeable improvement over the maligned beta build. Taking a page out of the Call of Duty design doc, MOH adopts a leveling up and killstreak mechanic. With varying degrees of success, the multiplayer still does not feel wholly honest or original in its design. MOH’s multiplayer plays like how dating your ex’s sibling or close relative feels. The person may look and act like your ex, but it is just not the same.

Ultimately, the multiplayer, developed by Battlefield developer DICE, is only Medal of Honor in name. The multiplayer plays nothing like Danger Close’s campaign. Rather, it feels like a faster and twitchier version of DICE’s previous shooter, Bad Company 2. The disconnect between singleplayer and multiplayer is most obvious in its running animation and reloading animations. When running in singleplayer, there are two distinct animations: a gun model that is bobbing up and down as the player runs and a gun model that is the default ‘at arms’. There are no transitional frames of animation to marry the two. What this amounts to is a binary run animation that constantly is snapping from one model state to another. Compared to the smooth transition animation present in MOH’s multiplayer and in Bad Company 2, it comes off as an example of how sloppy and generally buggy MOH really is.

It is hard to recommend Medal of Honor. There are so many other games on the market that are better designed and executed. What it does well are not worth 60 USD. Medal of Honor’s real value and contribution is not meant for the gaming public to experience or see, but rather to developers. Medal of Honor, with its incongruities and half-baked bandwagoning, is an example of what not to do.