Medal of Honor: European Assault Feature Preview

Since its original 1999 installment on the PlayStation, Medal of Honor has placed gamers in key conflicts from just about every major campaign of World War II. From the bloody beaches of Normandy in Frontline to the steamy island jungles of the Pacific theater in Rising Sun and Pacific Assault, the long-running series has stretched a wide range of scenarios across a linear-action framework that's been fairly static from game to game. But with the latest installment, European Assault, the series' designers have taken the opportunity to revise Medal of Honor's underpinnings in some significant ways. From our preliminary hands-on time with the game, it looks like these changes will make for a more robust and exciting combat experience in the long run.

The previous Medal of Honor games have presented a mixture of all-out action (such as storming the beaches on D-day) and secretive operations (such as sneaking around the back alleys of some French village or other). European Assault is getting a little more secretive than usual, though. It puts you in the shoes of Lieutenant William Holt, the lone Yank enrolled in Britain's Office of Strategic Services, a covert-ops organization and forerunner to the modern CIA. Holt and his comrades will be charged with going behind enemy lines in order to retrieve sensitive information, secretly disrupt enemy operations, and generally wage a "secret war" against the Nazi wehrmacht at every turn.

Your duties as an OSS officer will take you to four areas of the European theater throughout the game. You'll start off by taking part in a daring nighttime raid on the St. Nazaire dry dock in an attempt to disable the marauding German battleship Tirpitz. Later on, you'll travel to northern Africa to battle Rommel, the "Desert Fox" himself, and you'll spend time with prototype weaponry in Russia and Belgium in the second half of the game. You'll go into each mission with a clear main objective, but optional secondary objectives will become available as you encounter them, like demolishing a radio tower or retrieving stolen documents. Completing these types of objectives will earn you a greater rank. If you want to achieve a perfect ranking, you'll be able to replay past missions later on to attempt any of these objectives you've missed.

On the gameplay side of things, longtime Medal of Honor fans will notice that while the core shooting action in European Assault is similar to past titles, most other aspects of the run-and-gun gameplay have been significantly altered. Most importantly, the battlefields are much broader than those seen in the past. Previous games usually had you running from point A to B in a linear fashion, gunning down any enemies that popped up on the way. Though your compass will indicate the direction you need to go to complete your primary and secondary objectives, the action in European Assault takes place across much wider levels that afford you frequent opportunities to choose your path or find multiple cover points. It also allows the designers to position enemies in places other than directly in front of you, which helps to heighten the tension and frenzy of battle.

With so many available places to find cover, it makes sense that European Assault's designers have greatly increased the importance of using cover in the midst of a firefight. You'll be able to zoom in by bringing your weapon up and looking down the old iron sights, and when you're in this zoomed view, you can use the left stick to lean left and right or raise your head up a bit from a crouched position in order to take potshots at enemies.

We put this new gameplay dynamic to the test by attempting to charge several enemy positions head-on, and found that in European Assault you take damage from direct fire pretty darn fast (gee, just like if you were shot with a real gun). Even on the normal difficulty, we didn't survive long using these tactics. But that's OK, because from what we've played so far--running from cover to cover and ducking down and popping out to exchange fire--it seems the action is a lot more exciting than simply running into every new area with guns ablaze.

When you do take damage, you'll notice the power-up system in the game has been changed up quite a bit, too. You'll now find health packs scattered around each level that you'll hold in an inventory rather than use immediately. You can squirrel these away for use on yourself when the action gets fierce, or you can choose to heal a nearby squadmate who's low on health. Instant-heal items will also be available, but the ability to restore health at your discretion adds a little bit of extra strategy to the proceedings.

Battlefield, 1942

The series' power-up iconography has become more arcadelike in this installment as well, with brightly colored icons representing weapons, ammo, health, and so on, rather than realistic depictions of these items. According to director Chris Cross, this should help to facilitate the rapid decision making required by the pacing of the action, since you don't have to stop to consider what an item is from far away before you decide to try to reach it.

European Assault will also place increased emphasis on interaction with the other soldiers fighting alongside you, though you'll be free to ignore their presence if you prefer an army-of-one approach. A squad of troops will fight next to you throughout each mission, and you'll be able to order them to move to certain points on the battlefield or recall them to your position at the touch of a button. As mentioned, you'll also be able to sacrifice your own health packs to heal them when they're about to go down, and it can be extremely useful to keep all your allies alive when you're heading into an intense battle and need the extra firepower.

Healing your teammates also confers a secondary benefit: it increases your adrenaline meter. When this meter is full, you'll be able to enter a brief period of extreme combat readiness during which you'll be invulnerable, have unlimited ammo, and be able to kill enemies with one shot. In addition to healing your allies, you'll get extra adrenaline through other acts of valor, such as completing secondary objectives, taking out multiple enemies at once, and scoring headshots.

When you do go down, all is not necessarily lost, since you'll be able to pick up "revives" that function as extra lives during a mission. If you die with a revive in your possession, you'll come back to life and continue fighting. Completing a secondary objective will net you an extra revive, so there's definitely some incentive beyond just getting the best medal to go out into the mission and see what else needs to be taken care of. Often, this will include tracking down and eliminating key Nazi officers who the designers are referring to as "nemesis" characters and who will function sort of like bosses.

The list of improvements to European Assault's gameplay goes on and on. You'll now be able to "cook" your grenades--that is, hold them for a few seconds--before throwing them, which lets you time the explosion with the 'nade's arrival at its target. It's a good thing you can, since the Nazis know how to toss your grenades back at you. Luckily, you have this ability too, so it's even possible to get into a deadly game of grenade soccer in some cases.

The EA Los Angeles team has spent considerable effort improving the Medal of Honor technology for European Assault, and the fruits of its labor are most obvious in the number of soldiers you'll see during the biggest battles. Whereas you'd see no more than a dozen or so characters at once in previous games, the new engine can purportedly handle 35 to 50 characters depending on various factors, which obviously makes for more heated, larger-scale battles than we've seen in the past. The team has also implemented the Havok physics engine to enable a full rag-doll-death animation system, which we've seen work to nice cinematic effect during our first few hours with the game.

European Assault's emphasis is clearly on a cohesive, cinematic single-player game, so the developers have opted not to include an online mode. But at least it'll ship with a fully functional split-screen multiplayer mode that will accommodate up to four people, with 16 maps and a host of gameplay modes available. We'll get to find out how this multiplayer and the sprawling single-player campaign have panned out sooner rather than later--European Assault ships on June 6 (that's D-day, for you history buffs) on the PS2, Xbox and GameCube. Look for a full review of the game then, and in the meantime, check out an exclusive developer interview and host of new gameplay movies on our media page.