While it does give off a superbly foreboding atmosphere, there's little else to recommend in Medal of Honor.

User Rating: 5.5 | Medal of Honor X360
By RollingMeatball | Review Date:
I remember back when I was a youngster, and Medal of Honor was the shíznit (is that still cool to say?). OK, I'm talking like I'm sixty years old or something right now, but we've come a long way from PS2 and XBOX. And Medal of Honor was a pretty consistent franshise. But on the latter generation of consoles, they were getting nowhere, both critically and financially. Lets face it, no other tactical warfare game stands chance when they're released next to their contemporaries Call of Duty. So how are Medal of Honor going to attempt to recover their once first class reputation? Reboot the game to the standards of other modern warfare games today, thats how. In the day and age where WW2 games are considered old, there's no other way to go about it. One might percieve this concept as a rip off of COD4, arguarbly the first game to touch on that notion. But while they revolutionized it, it paves the way for other developers to expand on the idea. So far, the most succesful is probably the Bad Company series, and in my opinion do it better than the last couple of Call of Dutys. But now we are getting clone upon clone. Not just the concept, however, because if there's enough ideas it can be considered fresh. No, I'm talking about the gameplay as well. This is where the first installment of the rebooted Medal of Honor series fail. It ultimately copy and pastes everything from the COD franshise with a couple of twists here and there so they'll get away without being branded a straight up rip off.

There's a lot to contradict in this game, but to be fair there's very few major flaws. The biggest has already been mentioned before hand. Its the been there, done that scenario, only not half as good. Other flaws include the frame rate. It goes very glitchy at times, and small stuff like the sprinting with gun animations, and the slice of a knife as it is literally a flash. The animations seem very lazy, and not a huge contradiction, but a slight put off.

The story mode is great fun in the first half, with enough diversity to keep it fresh, but eventually even this becomes tedious. Stuff like flying in helicopters and driving the snow mobiles are chores, and really drag. The enemy AI is incredibly stupid. They don't do much but stand in one position and move at random positions, and are pretty much vunerable to any grenade you throw. The storyline itself is again nothing new, and absolutely pointless. Then the voice acting, while not awful, seems like its trying to hard. Something you'd expect of a B-movie action flick. It really gets that cheesy. However, the highlight is the atmosphere, which at some points can get so dark it almost gives you a sickly feeling. In particular the stealth missions, which are where it truly shines. The difficulty is really easy, even on hard mode, that even the least experienced of gamers can complete with little trouble. The campaign takes around 6 hours to complete, and after that I doubt you'll touch it again. The multiplayer is fun for a few days, but so much connection problems and maps being overrun by snipers, it gets totally fustrating. Not only that but it gets dull very quickly also, and makes you want to put on COD or BC2 instead. As for Tier 1 Mode, I never want to go through the campaign again so I can't really say much for if it makes story mode more fun or not.

The graphics are sub par, below the standards we expect of games as of late. Not terrible however, the level design offers a superb variety so there's little to fault there. Character models are pretty ugly, especially the facial structures. Sound though is a great acclompishment, and packs a powerful punch particuarly with gun shots. Hearing screaming in the background is another aspect that gives it a foreboding atmosphere, not making it more realistic, but intense at the same time.

Overall, despite the nice amount of content, little of it impresses enough to recommend, and fustrations rule over quantity here. With so many tactical shooters out there doing the same thing much better, I highly recommend avoiding this. While not an awful game at all, it definitely isn't great.

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