Medal of Honor: Airborne - REVIEW
Initially I didn’t want to even try out the demo, but since it was already installed on my PC anyway I thought “Why not?” so I tried it out. So I started this motherfucker up and was like “This’d better be an improvement over Pacific Assault or I’m going to do something crazy.” and fortunately it was! But it didn’t stop there, it was actually loads better than any other MoH prior to this one, and not because of the new “Drop your ass anywhere you want even though there’s only 2 real choices to choose from” feature either! Yes that is right, that whole feature is a crock of shit but we’ll get into that later on.
Breaking the habit
Unlike all the previous MoH games, the developers didn’t promise us the dawn of a new age in gaming and then having none of the features they promised in-game. Like in Pacific Assault, they promised us all sorts of amazing stuff like destructible environments and super intelligent squad AI but only gave us a few towers that we could blow up and a squad AI that made me want to kill myself. Your squad is the most intelligent one featured in any game, you say? More like all they do is hide behind objects when the enemy is firing at them from the direction they are NOT hiding from. That’s just fucking genius.
No, this time they said land anywhere and start your mission from there! But in reality you can choose to land on one of the safe spots that are marked by green smoke, OR you can choose to land on top of a random building and be surrounded by hundreds of enemies with no support from your squad that basically just lands ANYWHERE… Where there is green smoke. Yes that’s right! All those parachute misdrops? Not in Airborne! No, everyone can basically land their WWII parachute anywhere they want! How? Well since this is physically impossible I’d have to say either BioShock plasmids, or… Ancestral ghosts. Duh…
What else sucks total monkey dick about this game? Your squad is not all that smart. Yes, now they hide behind an object that can actually shield them from the enemy rain of bullets, but then that’s all they ever really do. They just hide and shoot from their cover. Only once all the enemies are dead, or there is nothing to take cover behind, will they get their asses up and advance towards the next objective. I know this isn’t Brothers in Arms, but can’t they at least TRY to flank the enemy and vice versa? No, just dig in and shoot away all your ammo and see if there’s anyone left on the other side. Great.
Graphics
The graphics are pretty nextgen, so that’s a good thing. There’s even a nice motion blur post-processing effect that, unlike Rainbow Six: Vegas‘ motion blur, does not cause hitches in the FPS despite of the fact that you’ve got a rig that could run the game twice. Overall the FPS was actually very steady and I was actually surprised when it would hitch every 2 hours or so. There’s a lot of well-placed HDR. No Lost Coast HDR with the entire world seeming to blind you wherever you look. As I’ve said countless times, put motion blur and HDR in a game and you’ve already got a pretty damn good looking game regardless of the poly count on the 3D objects in the game or the resolution of the textures. Not that there’s anything wrong with any of those things in this game! The game is obviously running on the Unreal Engine 3 which allows for some pretty amazing graphics. Fire looks AMAZING in this game and so does smoke, though it’s not as good as Call of Duty 2’s smoke. The 3D skybox is also very good looking with all kinds of things going on all around you, it would almost make you forget that each map is incredibly small and there are actual invisible walls! INVISIBLE WALLS!!! EA takes us back a decade by placing invisible walls around the map, oh how nostalgic.
Sound
The good ol’ Medal of Honor soundtrack is back with some changes that still give the game it’s own unique feel. There’s not a whole lot to say about the music since pretty much everyone knows what I’m talking about. The sound effects are amazing. There, that’s one thing this game excels in. Some sound effects are just so realistic you’d almost think you’re actually in the game hearing all of those sounds. I never knew SFX were that important! All the weapons sound right, though they could have used a bit more punch to ‘em and the voice acting is good but nothing special.
Gameplay
What’s there to say? You land, you regroup with your squad and you start to complete your objectives one at a time. The order in which you complete them is up to the player to decide, but usually it’s just smarter to do ‘em all in one particular order since it’s the only smart thing to do. Of course you could fuck with the game and see if you can complete the objectives in a different order, but there’s usually a shitload of enemies waiting to stop you from doing so and even if you manage to do everything backward and still live to make it to the next map, it’s 
going to be even more impossible to do so there since the enemies keep getting tougher and tougher, not because that’s what happened in real life but because this is a game that was designed by people who think “traditional gameplay” equals “Fuck smart AI, just make the enemies stronger and faster and better at aiming but give them different colors so every level is harder for the player to complete!”. If you’re the genius behind this decision then I have one thing to say: FUCK YOU. This could have been a great game if the difficulty of the levels wasn’t raised by the good ol’ “same enemies, just a lot harder to kill” principle. Now the game is just mediocre and enjoyable, but not amazing and memorable.
Conclusion
Despite all of my criticism, this is the best MoH ever. Which is pretty sad when you think about it, but it’s still an enjoyable game that’ll keep you playing for a few hours. I didn’t count but I believe I read somewhere there were 6 maps? I thought it was just 1 map with different art assets here and there. Every time you’ll complete all of the objectives, and you’ll be ordered to go to some other place where you’ll be introduced to the new enemy units you’ll be facing from now on. It’s like a freaking 1980’s game! But regardless, it’s good fun so I’ll give it a 7/10 for enjoyable gameplay and good graphics combined with surprisingly good sound! What had the potential to be an amazing WWII shooter was simply killed by certain game elements that were copied from some old SNES game. I hope you’re proud of yourself EA. But fuck it, I’m still waiting for Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway to show me what a real WWII shooter is capable of.
EDIT: Fucking typos and grammar errors everywhere! It’s too damn late to be typing this type of shit anyway… I think I fixed most of ‘em if not all.
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Nice review
Thx Nuggler.
Thanks for your impressions of the game. Maybe i will try it out some day in the future … atm i’m just to lazy
The fact that the sound is really great makes me really interested in the game. The ‘best sound’ so far i’ve heard comes from the hl2 mod Insurgency, just amazing!
For the most part I do agree with you. It’s a game worth checking out while waiting for CoD 4 and BiA. The crazy gasmask nazi’s with the MG42’s were way over the top, but the game will keep you occupied for an evening or two (literally, way too short).
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