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 Post subject: PS3 - Medal of Honor 2010
PostPosted: Fri Nov 26, 2010 7:34 pm 
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Title: Medal of Honor
Genre: 1st Person Shooter
Developer: Danger Close (EA Los Angeles) [SP], Digital Illusions [MP]
Publisher: EA Games
Rating: BBFC - 18, ESRB - M
Formats: PS3, Xbox360, PC.

Synopsis:
The invasion of Afghanistan is on, and Tier One operatives are due to meet with a local contact by the name of Tariq. Tariq has vital information on both the Taliban and Al-Qaeda forces in the area, significant enough to warrant a risky insertion. But then again, that's what Tier One are all about. After finding out the information about nearly a thousand enemies in the area, Command needs a forward base to call their own, and a local airfield seems to be the perfect spot for the guys to set up camp. Local Afghan National Army troops are going to be you main allies in this, and are going to make up the bulk of the force.

As to be expected, remote commanders know nothing about what's happening on the ground, and orders an AC-130 to open fire on an unidentified convoy. This turns out to be a massive mistake, as the AC-130 rips through your Afghan colleagues, leaving your local commander no choice, but to buckle under the weight of command, and deploy the Rangers to the field.
Shit very quickly turns ugly, as the Rangers immediately come under fire, after entering the fray with the grace of a epileptic elephant mid-seizure, and are being decimated under the weight of lead flying around. Once the situation is contained, a small group of Ranger specialists quickly move off to secure the area, and have a marginally good time of it. However, when moving to secure another landing area, they are taken unaware by an IED (prompting the fantastic line of "You hear anything in there?... Wait... cellphone? *BEWM*"), and promptly surrounded. Running low on ammo, with an endless army of Taliban insurgents attacking them, they radio in for assistance, which comes in the form of a couple of Apaches to lay down some hurt. Once extracted, the action then moves back to the Tier One team.

Neptune Tier One team is moving up the Takur Ghar area, killing mortar teams and patrols all over the place, when at the extraction zone, half the team make it to the helicopter, and half are left behind. Giving the commander the verbal finger, the extracted half of Neptune, Mother and Rabbit, rejoin the fight, and search for the missing Voodoo and Preacher...


Medal of Honor has been one half of the driving force behind FPS games of recent years, working alongside the Call of Duty series to almost attempt to legitimise and mainstream console gaming for the masses. Vastly successful, and in need of a reboot to keep a cash cow making that milk, MoH deals directly with the current campaign in Afghanistan. The mass-market introduction of the Tier One Operatives (Also called DEVGRU, formerly Seal Team Six), basically Americas rip off of the UKs double-hard bastards (Formerly called the SAS :D), and their behind-the-lines, sketchy operative limits.
Now, I'm all in favour of a good old fashioned cracking of skulls, and even if it's a number of different campaigns all rolled into one, that's still cool. But something about MOH really dropped the ball.

The campaign is arranged chronologically, with the actions taking place over a single day and a bit, from the rescue of Tariq, to the full on deployment of the USAs military muscle. The General, who's safely in some office in the US, is throwing orders around the place, and fucking things up, like remote management usually do. Ok, so that's established that shit's going to go wrong at some point, but the way how the chronological layout handles it is confusing. You constantly switch back and forth between the two Tier One teams, Neptune and the Wolfpack, and the Rangers. The changes happen so fast that you have no time to grow attached to any character, nor really understand what's going on (admittedly that works with the Rangers section, as multiple piles of shit hits multiple fans simultaneously), making the whole action seem remote, and with the minimum amount of immersion possible.

Another big bugbear of mine is inconsistency between what you're told to do by the NPCs, and what you can actually do. For example you roll up to a town on some incredibly noisy APCs, then go immediately into a stealth section, having literally just parked the APCs the other side of the fence. This stealth section took me about 10 tries to do, before proclaiming bullshit, and just gunning everything down in sight with the first AK I could find.

Cover based shooters in FPS games aren't fantastic, as you generally can't see what you're shooting at, and MOH scores a little higher on that. The "peep and shoot" system works well, although some cover is destructible, and some don't stop enemy shots, but block yours like they were never fired... Grenades have a big old thump when they go off, with the added shell shock if you're close enough to see the grenade marker when it explodes. Strange that... you can't see around cover, but you can psychically tell where anything explosive is... Not knowing where grenades are works for Halo, just doesn't seem good enough for MOH.

Graphically, MOH isn't all that great. Unreal3 is getting a bit long in the tooth, especially for a class of games that are usually sold on their looks. Even during the depressingly short campaign, there's a number of both graphical glitches, and a couple of massive glaring AI bugs that caused me to have to restart whole missions, after the checkpoint saves still gave the problems. QA, obviously not one of EA LA's strong points...

Outside of the short single player campaign, there's not really any need to pick up any spare weapons that you find, like most shooters. All of your allies carry ample amounts of spare ammo, although you are limited to how many you can grab, an ally must also have your weapon, which at least one of them will. This really takes any difficulty in ammo conservation away, especially with either the larger machine guns, or all of the sniper rifles, as you're given enough ammo for the average sniper rifle to stave off the zombie apocalypse several times. And then you've got another 3 refills to go through.

Overall, MOH 2010 really feels like an FPS for dummies. Throw in a modern setting, and more controversy than Modern Warfare 2's Airport scene, and you've got a marketing machine that even the US Amy won't stock.

Scores!

Graphics: Shiny and dull at the same time, with the increasingly dating Unreal3 providing the grunt. Realistic settings call for realism in the furniture, which MOH does deliver in. Shame about the SP engine choices, given EA's massive development teams - A-

Gameplay: Disappointing narrative, confusing switches between players really don't help, although basing the events loosely off of real operations is a nice touch to revive an otherwise floundering product - B-

Sound: Someone really did their homework for this part. Weapons all sound pretty accurate going from game to sample videos of the weapons themselves. Locals screaming abuse at you in the local dialect, and the AI giving pretty concise directions help the game along well - A

Replay: Absolutely none for the single player campaign. Trophies and achievements are given for completing the section, and doing one easy thing during each. Multiplayer is the same old tired "Cops vs Robbers" shootout that we're used to seeing. Same old boredom, wrapped up in different shiny. XP system has been done much better in other games, and done to death by just about every other game out there - F

Overall: Series reboots are always accompanied by the studio trying to milk the last drops out of the cash cow before giving a double-barrelled funeral, with Medal of Honor being no exception. The single player campaign is tragically short, with weak narrative (We get it, SEALs are dirty bastards, and the Rangers are hard. Quit it already). Multiplayer has nothing new to offer the Call of Duty players. The inclusion of Medal of Honor: Frontline on the PS3 version as extra content is just a spit in the face to people who have previously purchased the PS2 version, as it's just barely remastered in 720p.

If you're a massive fan of the Medal of Honor series, then chances are you've been won over by Call of Duty. There's very little in the new MOH to really shout home about - B-

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 Post subject: Re: PS3 - Medal of Honor 2010
PostPosted: Fri Nov 26, 2010 10:59 pm 
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Actually, the game IS stocked on US military bases. The military threatened to ban the sale of the game if EA kept the Taliban as the other side of multiplayer, but since EA wussed out and changed it to the OpFor (which, contrary to a lot of publications' proclamations, isn't lame and unimaginative, as that's what the US military calls the "bad guys" in all their training ops, making things even more authentic in my book), the ban wasn't put in place. Just FYI.

Aside from that, can't really see anything I'd disagree with, based on the limited things I've seen and what I've heard from GI podcasts and other sources. I've actually heard this game called MW2's boring little brother, and considering that the game really doesn't bring anything new to the table, I'm inclined to agree.

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 Post subject: Re: PS3 - Medal of Honor 2010
PostPosted: Fri Nov 26, 2010 11:27 pm 
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The stupid thing is, that the T1 guys interchange Taliban and Al-Qaeda, sometimes multiple times in the same firefight, so bang goes any consistency...

And about the US Army thing, I could only see things about them banning it, not anything about it being available. Guess a ban being overturned doesn't make news as often as a "home team" banning it from stores.

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 Post subject: Re: PS3 - Medal of Honor 2010
PostPosted: Sat Nov 27, 2010 12:33 am 
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Yeah, I never saw any news story about the game being sold on military bases. I just know that it was going to be banned because the opposition was called the Taliban. I think it's fairly reasonable to assume that since the name was changed, the game's not gonna be banned.

As for the interchangeability, was it in "official" exchanges (e.g. reading of intel, communication of orders), or was it just between the soldiers? 'Cause if it was the latter, I don't see a lack of inconsistency, seeing as a lot of people over here often confuse the two in general conversation. Sure, when they stop to think about it, they know the difference, but in the course of conversation, one group of radical ragheads is as easy to mention as the other. ;)

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