If you feel like playing a game you have more than likely played a dozen times now, then maybe this game is for you.
Medal of Honor's greatest weakness, by far, is its inability to be entertaining. It is never quite horrible, but it is so boring, so lacking in heart, soul, compassion, and love (from the developers that is), that you can tell while playing the game that Danger Close had absolutely no idea (at f#$%ing all really) what they were doing. The game constantly fluctuates between trying to portray a realistic depiction of modern warfare, to throwing you into a clichéd action movie set-piece battle. While action packed set-pieces are not a bad thing (except when they're inane and boring), having them in a game that is supposed to be all about realism feels like a cheap cop-out. What sinks the campaign even further is not only is it boring in every single aspect, but it is far too easy (I died twice on hard), and it is unforgivably short (4-5 hours). When you manage to make your already boring game about two hours shorter than its competition, then what kind of message are you sending to your consumers? "Hey, we put very little effort into making this game worth the sixty dollars that we know you are going to pay. Maybe we should have actually tried to make the campaign even remotely memorable, but hey, what do we care, we aren't the ones being ripped off." Jerk-offs… The campaign starts off slow and it never picks up speed. To make matters worse, I can't even tell if it wants to get better. Nothing in the campaign implies that the developers cared about this project, which leads me to my next complaint.
The overall lack of polish in this game is atrocious, unforgivable, and downright pathetic in this day and age. When you tout your game as a realistic, and authentic portrayal of war, you better make damn sure it not only feels like it, but looks like it too. An overall lack of polish doesn't necessarily ruin a game if the core game-play itself is enjoyable, but with Medal of Honor, it fails in both regards. The game is not only boring, but it looks dated as hell. We are gaming in the year 2010. Developers are constantly pushing graphical capabilities to the max, and multi-platform games such as MW2 are a testament to just how far visuals have come, so when a "next-gen" game like Medal of Honor comes out with visuals that are no better than those of Modern Warfare 1, I can't help but be both annoyed, and disappointed. Certain visual aspects of this game are a major bright spot, such as the bright and sandy deserts, while others are downright appalling. The explosions in this game look worse than the explosions in Call of Duty 2, and that is pathetic. Even more blemishes mar what could have been a pretty damn good looking game. The textures are almost always jagged, there is loads of pop-in, the particle effects are depressingly bland, the lighting is very poorly rendered, and it just doesn't look very good. It looks like a 2006-2007 game for the Xbox360 at its best, and a 2004 PC title at its worst. The multiplayer visuals are even duller than the single players. An even worse aspect of the games presentation and design is its artificial intelligence (though I use the term intelligence lightly). Enemies are dumb as a brick, and remember when I mentioned earlier that I died twice? Well, one of those deaths was from a cheap choke point, and the other was a result of an enemy AI glitch. About an hour into the game I ran into an enemy on a rooftop, just standing there, idly staring out the window at his fallen comrades below. I couldn't quite tell until I got close enough to see the difference in his uniform that he was an enemy, and even when I was ten feet away from him, he refused to acknowledge my existence, so, naturally, I got close. I got less than a foot away from the brain-dead baddie and wiggled my rifle barrel into his face. I did a little jig in front of him for about ten seconds and still nothing. Finally as I was about to back away from him to kill him with a grenade (for fun) he turned to face me, shouted something in what I assume was Arabic (correct me if I'm wrong) and shot of an RPG (that magically appeared in his hands) at less than a foot away, killing us both instantly. While these kinds of AI glitches are funny, this one was so bad that I was more angered than entertained. Other enemies (the non suicidal narcoleptic ones) will take cover behind nothing, fire their weapons at you through the wall (and I mean they stick their gun barrels through solid objects), run towards a thrown grenade, rather than away from it, take inaccurate potshots at you for seemingly no reason whatsoever (he missed me when my back was turned and I was five feet away from him), and are just plain dumb. Friendly AI is even worse at times, but they still killed a few enemies during my playthrough, so I guess that's commendable.
The multiplayer is ok. There, that's all I have to say about that.
In the end Medal of Honor just isn't very good. It's by no means a bad game, but it falls way too short of being even an okay game. Its boring, uninspired story, lackluster presentation, derivative, and extremely boring game-play, its bad AI, and a whole mess of other little annoyances make this game a prime example of what happens when a whole lot of talk, and very little love, go into making a game. The end result is a boring, unoriginal, and unpolished experience that doesn't deserve your money. Not everything about Medal of Honor was bad, the music was great, the voice acting was decent (even if the script wasn't), and the pacing of the campaign (as boring as it was) was nice. Yet so much of this game is just bad and disappointing that I can't recommend it to anyone, not even hardcore fans of the genre. Let this game be a lesson to publishers and game developers everywhere, put your heart into a game if you want it to be good.