After yesterday's post, I played some Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and was reminded of why I took a break from it. As I mentioned in the review, the game's experience is dependent on your team mates. I lost most all my matches last night because of those team mates. Those who only care about killing goes up and does get the most kills, but also died the most and used up most of the team's tickets while not fulfilling the objectives. Squad mates complaining players to stop playing sniper and rush forward just bugged me because I was a sniper and was the one getting the most capture points, defuses, and squad assists. Afterwards, I logged onto Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and played a few good games with the last one with me getting the winning shot. Today's game review will be a sort of mix between Battlefield and Call of Duty.
Official Site: http://www.medalofhonor.com/
Source: Youtube Channel medalofhonor
Developer: Danger Close (Single-Player) DICE (Multiplayer)
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Platforms: Playstation 3, Xbox 360 & PC
Release Date: October 12, 2010.
Genre: First-Person Shooter
Pros:
-Beautifully presented graphics that is both dynamic and easy on the eyes
-Incredible sound engineering with the best recordings and output of audio in any FPS
-Encourages players to work together with specific designs to the maps
-Immersive gameplay with a moving storyline
Cons:
-Program specific triggers and events in Single-player breaks the flow of the game
-Weapons and maps are unbalanced and/or bugged/exploited
-Game's experience for team-specific maps are dependent on team mates
-Limited number of weapon customization, modes, and maps to play on
Medal of Honor (2010) surpassed all expectations out of me as I've never really had any interest in the series due to its dark muddled color schemes, trigger-specific gameplay, and clunky controls for competitive multiplayer. Medal of Honor has been out for 7 months now and has sold approximately 5 million copies which does not beat the sales of Call of Duty: Black Ops, Halo: Reach, or its own game Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Despite quickly ignored after the release of Black Ops, the game is a fun shooter that truly had me on edge through the campaigns and kept me excited during multiplayer matches. There are many aspects that make the game great but is hindered by problems that eventually discourages its players to leave. Despite minor set-backs, I was happy with my purchase of the game and hope that the series sees as much quality as this one did with resolution to the problems it had before.
Graphics
The graphics for Medal of Honor is simply magnificent and a huge difference from previous installments within the series. This was the video that got me interested in trying out the game:
Source: Youtube Channel medalofhonor
The models are clean, the colors are dynamic and is easier on the eyes, the textures are sharp and beautiful and the effects are amazing. Something as simple as explosions from grenades were a spectacle to see during multiplayer with every detail to environment debris, smoke, the lighting from the fire, and the audio tops it off making it as realistic and immersive as possible. There were parts of the game where textures went haywire and glitched out of the models in mountains, the sky, or trees. The found the HUD to be pretty unique with a nice futuristic feeling color and lighting effect similar to Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter series. The points display is similar to Call of Duty and presents itself in a clean semi-neon text. The HUD is really nice in that its information is straight forward and also doesn't take too much of the screen making for efficient use without being a hindrance. Graphics: 10/10
Audio
Possibly the first thing I immediately noticed when I tried the game on PC during open beta was the sound of the guns. They sounded so powerful (I have headphones on when playing) and close rather than just being a recording of a gunshot. I'm not exactly sure what the sound engineers did for the audio, but the reverb from explosions, gunshots, taking hits, and voice acting were all incredible and possibly the best I've ever heard out of a FPS game. It might be just me, but I think the programming and recordings for the sound effects in multiplayer is different from singleplayer. Single-player doesn't have that bombastic effect in the gunshots as it does in Multiplayer. I loved it so much that I went out of my way to buy an audio processor so that I could use headphones with simulated surround sound on my Playstation 3. The sound of a shotgun, machine gun, and especially sniper rifle never sounded so good in a videogame before. Audio: 10/10 (By the way, if you play with headphones on and have a strong bass, getting shot is pretty scary which I felt added the effect to multiplayer. An incentive not to get shot = sudden loud thump noise of bullets hitting the body).
Gameplay
The singleplayer and multiplayer were developed separately by two different teams and will be judged as such starting with the singleplayer. I really liked the singleplayer, but not without some complaints. Some of the events are cinematic-style scenes which tends to drag on sometimes, especially if it's not the first player through. The firefights can get pretty exciting, but it comes to a complete halt when a programmed trigger is not activated. This can be frustrating when the player doesn't know what would be causing the game not to continue with the story. An example is when one of the scenes mission was to get to the building inside, the allies AI crowds around the door, but no one can get in. Luckily, I've faced weird bugs such as these before in videogames and looked around the rest of the area and found one lone enemy hiding in cover facing the direction I came in from. The game continued after I killed him. This isn't a matter of realism, but a basis for game design and the flow of gameplay the player experiences. I ran into these sort of problems several times during the game and it really killed the suspense when the game was building up tension. There were many events throughout the campaign that were really pushing the player to be more alert and constantly participating in the action. The story is told through several perspectives and really brings the player back around to the main characters. I think there's a possibility that I liked the campaign of Medal of Honor a little more than Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and Call of Duty: Black Ops as MoH truly kept me on edge and holding my breath throughout the entire game. The campaign can also be played on Tier 1 mode which I guess is a super hard difficulty challenge. The game was hard enough on normal, I'm not sure if I can get through the whole game on Tier 1 mode.
Source: Youtube Channel medalofhonor
Multiplayer is a different experience from the singleplayer (of course) but has its own entertainment values. Multiplayer is typical two sides versus matches with 4 game modes. I've only played the capture point and death match modes as those are the most populated. Players can choose from three different classes, each with their own loadouts and equipment choices: Assault, Special Ops, Sniper. The capture points mode and other modes are dependent on team play and are such reliant on the type of players you get matched up with. When you get on a good team, the experience can be quite exhilarating and satisfying with you and your team mates rushing the front, watching each other's backs, and deploying team specific perks. The game can be a horrible experience too though with more reasons than one. Having bad team mates can make for a one-sided fight since players will rush to their deaths on their own thinking they'll just respawn and kill some more like in Call of Duty (which is fine for deathmatch actually). There's also the problem of how players spawn. In capture points, enemy players that have played enough will know exactly where you and your team mates spawn and can literally camp in an area where they can kill you the second you spawn. This can be behind your own base or in the fronts where they shoot in the general vicinity of where you will spawn. Some of the maps also causes players to funnel through the same area which makes it easy to spray and pray on anyone through through that path. If it's not a gunshot, players who were already spawn camping would have enough kills to call on mortar strikes on your team's spawn point and get a few good kills. The weapons have to be unlocked by leveling the class you played through a match by earning the points. So if you continually suffer and not play well, leveling will be a problem (wasn't too bad for me). Even with items unlocked, weapons are limited and few. The good thing is that there's not such thing as a useless weapon as all weapons are powerful (even pistols). Problem with that is some of the weapons are overpowering, and sometimes I like it because of it. Besides playing sniper (my favorite class), I would play special ops with a shotgun that can instantly kill anyone close OR mid-ranged. The shotgun's reach is so ridiculous that I've gotten kills across the map with about 3-5 shots before. I've gotten scores such as 32 Kills and 9 Deaths using a shotgun before because of how amazing the reach and power is (keep in mind that I play casually and am not very good at First-Person Shooters compared to most players online). The game really can get exciting and fun when everyone is playing fairly. But there are just too many design flaws, bugs, and exploits to deem it fair, consistently enjoyable, or even bearable when you're getting killed repeatedly from your spawn point. Gameplay: 8/10 (it would've been a 7/10, but the incredible audio, awesome sniper class and overpowering shotgun convinced me to give an extra point).
Replay Value
This portion is debatable and can vary from player to player. The game doesn't have that many modes, maps, or weapons, so the main experience is dependent on the people you play with (which usually turns out to be bad). Some players might get bored after unlocking everything as their incentive to play was to unlock items. Others might get turned off by the problems the game suffers from as described above. Most players I see online range from about 2000-4000 points of experience with a select few at 1000 or 8000. Those who have high experience points are often more than not ones who spawn camp racking up to 30-50 kills with 1-2 deaths. And what happens when one person does it? Their whole team joins in, making it difficult to near impossible to flank. With the Playstation Network still down, it's very uncertain what the future of Medal of Honor's online play is going to be like. The last few times I logged on, there was a max player count of about 1000-5000. The singleplayer was fun, but I would mainly replay it through tier 1 mode to test my skills. Even if I felt like playing multiplayer, it would be once in a while. I usually play deathmatch now if I want to play since the team-based ones can be infuriating with bad team mates. It's pretty difficult to recommend the game now for its multiplayer as its population is dwindling. I'll probably still play the game once in a while, but it's difficult to make a decision to do so each time I get free time since I have a large backlog of games. Replay Value: 7/10
Overall
If you can find the game for less than $20 and you enjoy military-themed FPS games, then I recommend playing through it for the experience. No other FPS has such detail and quality in its audio and realism as Medal of Honor (2010) (thus far). And if you're like me not liking previous Medal of Honor games as much, don't worry and give this game a chance as it's a huge difference from its older installments. With an exciting single player campaign and a broken yet entertaining multiplayer, the game should be tried out by all FPS players at least once. Overall: 8.75/10
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