Medal of Honor is a good example of how a lack of polish can nearly destroy a game, with emphasis on "nearly".
Medal of Honor takes place in a modern era as a group called Tier 1 who are fighting the terrorist forces of Al-Qaeda. There really isn't much to say about the story, and it isn't very interesting. Their are pretty cool set-piece moments in the campaign, but they are there to make the story seem more interesting, which it isn't. The story is boring, and isn't memorable in the slightest. It's a shame, and the one thing that really brings the story down, as I previously stated, was how boring and disappointing it was.
Even though the campaign is very short (6-7 hours), there is still a good amount of game to be had with this reboot. Online multiplayer is obviously a feature in this game, and it can be be good fun, and it also takes cues from Battlefield Bad Company 2. It has a slight balance issue, it doesn't feel as deep and fleshed out as BBC2, but it still can be some fun if you enjoy the solid the gameplay and happen to have a friend who has it.
There's also a variation on the single player campaign called "Tier 1 Mode". In this mode, you are playing through the campaign on a timer, gathering points to get your spot on a nicely designed leader-board. This mode only gives you one life to use for each level, and if you die, you have to start the level all over again. This mode gives a much needed flair to the single player campaign.
You'll get a good amount of play from this game, with another exclusive piece of game in the form of Medal of Honor: Frontlines. This is a classic game for the PS2, but in my opinion, this game hasn't aged very well, and this is for one simple reason, the health-bar. This was bearable in the first Call of Duty because of better design choices. While this is something long time MOH fans will enjoy, newer people to the series probably won't find much value.
As I said, you'll get a good amount of overall life to this game, with a fully fledged multiplayer, decent single player, and a revamped PS2 game. But where this game truly drops the ball, that affects these ways to play, is the design.
This, as I said, is where Medal of Honor goes wrong, all because this game needed more development time. The overall mission design is fine, and in some cases, even good. But it's messed up by the unnecessary amount of bugs and glitches. Example? In the mission where you control an ATV, when I got off the ATV to continue the mission, I couldn't move. I was baffled by this flaw, but when I restarted the mission all over again, it worked fine. Another example is towards the end of the game, where you are fighting enemies up a mountain. Here, the enemies never stopped re-spawning. After about 15 minutes of fighting this never ending war, I died. I tried it again, and got past it in no time at all, which is completely ridiculous.
This is the single player though, so the online must be bug free, considering it was developed by DICE, right? Well, how does freezing mid-game hold over for you? In my good hour of playing online, the game froze on me, twice. There is no excuse for this, and it all boils down to the fact that this game clearly needed more time to cook in the oven.
Aside from the array of bugs and glitches, there are a few weired choices in design. The checkpoints in the single player are awful. They are varied between levels, and they range from ridiculously easy to reach, and overly frustrating to get to. As for the multiplayer, a legitimate reason why it's at fault is the balancing between weapons. The six modes in the game are basic fare for a FPS, and they are good fun with friends on the great maps given to you. But chances are you will be killed cheaply by someone who happened to have much more of an advantage to you and your beginning classes of weapons, which don't really vary at all between which side you are playing on.
If this game had been delayed to 2011, these problems probably would be nonexistent, and it kills me to say this because this game would've been so much better if these continuous problems weren't here.
Even with all the design faults that can be find by just enjoying the game, this is still pretty fun. The gameplay is very similar to Call of Duty and past games in the series. Each of the guns are fun to shoot, and there is a lot of variety to how you destroy in the single player and multiplayer. Each type of weapon, while unbalanced, are still fun to customize online to your liking and usage, even though it is limited. The main problem is how friendly that aim-assist is. Essentially, the aim-assist does everything for you except shooting. Another thing I should mention are the options given to you. The game does a great job of giving you options to tune to your play style.
While this isn't anything we haven't seen before, with as much content there is, you will have an enjoyable time playing this game.
From a distance, you would say that this game looks great. But if you inspect this game and all of its aspects, this game looks very average. A lot of the textures in the game are blurry, and the character models are just decent. One area where this game exceeds with flying colors is the sound department. The weapons in the game sound phenomenal, with a great orchestra to back up up to give off a tense feeling. Again, if this game had more time, the weapons, characters, and environments would look a lot better.
Medal of Honor is quite possibly the most disappointing game of the year, while there are a lot of great aspects about the game, they are held down by multiple technical problems and poor design choices. If you've gotten tired of Black Ops and are in need of another modern FPS, this would be a decent purchase, but whether or not you will enjoy it is questionable.