Medal Of Honor: Campaign Review

Posted in Gaming, Reviews by Janx, October 22, 2010 at 4:48 pm | 2,836 views, 18 comments

Overview - A lot of gamers were really excited for this game when it was first announced. Then, when the first trailers and screenshots started to emerge, gamers became even more excited. And then, at E3 this year, gamers had a chance to test out the gameplay by shooting one another… and that seemed to even further excite everyone, including myself.

Then it all just seemed to all start falling apart for EA. First, the American political world stepped in and started throwing a hissy fit over the idea that gamers would be able to play as the Taliban and shoot American soldiers. And then EA caved to that pressure and removed the Taliban as an option for the player to fight as and the gaming world threw a hissy fit.

Well, for the purpose of this review, let’s just ignore all of that and stick to reviewing the game campaign for what it is… a game campaign, and not a political disaster.

The Medal of Honor campaign is fun to play. It’s well put together and it delivers on all the elements gamers have come to expect from an FPS these days. It’s no surprise that EA looked to the Call Of Duty franchise for ideas though. The Medal Of Honor campaign is so eerily similar in so many ways to the recent Call Of Duty games that sometimes you have to remind yourself you’re not playing COD.

Storyline - The campaign begins with a little quote from Laurence Binyon’s For the Fallen and then you’re off. You start playing as a Navy SEAL called Rabbit. You’re part of a four man team, you all have code-names and you’re all pretty badass dudes. The first level plays out at night in a village in Afghanistan. You’re meeting a source of yours to gather some intel. The game takes place just after America has gone to war with the Taliban in Afghanistan, in-case you didn’t already know. Sure enough, something goes wrong with your mission and you’re forced to start blasting bad guys. The rest you can likely fill in yourself.

Controls - The controls for the game are very solid and the game mechanics are very well tuned. If you play a lot of FPSes you’ll almost instinctively know all of the controls by heart. Everything works well and playing the game is a real treat. The graphics are also very sharp and the sounds are absolutely brilliant. Nothing puts you in the action more than the sound of a mini-gun blasting from a helicopter above you as you go hard on the enemy with your AK-47, which has that perfectly distinctive sound an AK-47 would have if you were firing it in real life.

Problems – The storyline is where Medal Of Honor really starts to fall apart. To start with, it’s extremely short. I managed to complete the entire campaign in under four hours and that’s not just too short by my standards, it’s too short by anyone’s standards. Even with FPSes focusing more and more on the multiplayer aspect these days there’s no excusing a campaign being this short. The small amount of storyline there is starts off well but then it starts to drag and the narrative switches you between so many different characters in such a short amount of time that you really don’t feel any sort of connection to any of them at all.

The other major complaint I have with the storyline is that it has you doing things every other modern day FPS has already had you doing before. There’s nothing here that really inspires and the missions that are supposed to excite you… don’t.

Conclusion – Overall the campaign is mechanically perfect but its lack of any real originality and its embarrassingly short completion time really kill it in the end. Again, this doesn’t feel like anything other than another Call Of Duty game, but it’s a fun few hours worth of gaming.