Review from someone who has beat it and taken notes, lol.
# of Medal of Honors played other then Airborne: 0
# of Call of Duty game played: 1 (Call of Duty 2 on 360)
I have played tons of FPS games including the whole Battlefield series.
Ok I will admit I bought this game on a whim as I thought the whole Airborne paratrooper thing sounded really cool. A FPS game where you choose where to start at not the designers. I think the concept more then satisfied my expectations. I think Gamespot and a few of the other sites have not really given enough credit to this design. Most other FPS games you play nowadays all feel like they are on a rail. A Disney ride where you start at Point A and end at Point B.
I can see how this must have been a huge challenge for the designers to pull off levels that allowed this sort of freedom. I will admit that on a few of the levels even though you do have freedom to go and start where you want you are funneled into certain areas where you basically follow a loose path the designers have set. But the freedom is astonishing and the whole parchuting gimmick is well done. I will go ahead and hit all the main areas of the game real fast....
Graphics are excellent. I guess in these post Gears of Wars days everyone can complain about the graphics on other games but to me the graphics were very well done on this game. Yeah maybe they could have done a bit more on some items. I would have liked to seen maybe one of the levels raining or maybe seen a bit more "shinyness" on the game like Gears and Bioshock for instance has but overall...the graphics are great.
Sound is a mixed bag. While the sound is all very well done....I experienced some sort of bug with the sound. Sometimes the music would get crazy loud....then other times the voice acting sound would get super low. Something is bugged there....perhaps will get fixed with a patch.
Length of the game....hmm this is a tough one. I played the game on Easy. It has 3 difficulties. Upon completing easy I have 405 gamer points. Not bad. It basically took me 2 days to finish the game on easy. I played about 3-4 hours one night and then about 6 the next. So maybe 10-11 hours I guess. Im sure some people will finish it much faster but I wasted a bit of time on trying to get some of the skill landings for extra points (Skill Landings are these things were there are 5 spots on each map that are difficult landings nad if you land on at least 1 on every level you get like 25 points I think).
I played a bit of multiplayer and it seems fun but its hard for me to play online FPS games with console controls. Its too frustrating. At least against the CPU its not as bad usually.
Anyway...Personally I dont have a problem with a game being a bit short if I have fun. I like to beat a game every once in a while. With this and Gears of War Ive actually beat 2 games recently which is kinda nice.
I can see myself playing this game more though. I actually believe I will start the campaign over again on Normal now...it was that much fun. The levels are all interesting and fun in their own way.
The only gripes I really have about the game follows:
- The sound glitch explained above.
- I wish there was about 1-2 more levels and it would have been perfect.
- Some of the enemy ai is a bit....goofy. But I played on easy so perhaps that explains it.
Everything else is great. I actually enjoyed this game much more then CoD2. I took a skip on CoD3 so not sure how it compares there. But this game is great fun and the whole Airborne parchutting thing really is cool. Makes the levels feel much more alive and less like a disney world rail ride.
-Tekkor (gamertag: TekkorGC)