Medal of Honour is a game that struggles with identity. Like the singleplayer campaign, MoH online matches are brown, grey, beige, serious, and rarely imbued with any kind of triumph. I had most success as a sniper, squatting on a grey rock and scanning the horizon. The online war is occasionally pretty – burning embers and smoke whipped across my field of vision as I sprinted for cover – but it's never beautiful. From there, I was able to plug two of them in the back of the head, and hide in a stairwell. I didn't expect a kill, but was able to use the dirt and dust kicked up by the detonation to scramble behind a bin before I was spotted. An example: penned in by four assailants in an alley, I hurled a frag grenade forward. But I adjusted to the slow tempo and rhythm of combat, and found it one of few games I've played against other humans where I've deployed actual battlefield creativity to succeed. It frustrated the (honour – Ed) out of me. The ease of death on Medal of Honor's multiplayer servers will frustrate some. I also found them to be more accurate: I had a float to my mouse-moves during the singleplayer that suggested the game was built for analogue sticks online that was stripped away to leave me with a headshot-perfect reticule. Weapons there are turbocharged, killing near instantly. This disconnect is even greater when you take your exploits online, the multiplayer portion of the game having been handled by an entirely separate studio: DICE, of Battlefield fame. In the case of a shotgun applied to a head, that reaction is “oh no, I don't have a head any more.” At least, that's true of your hordes of enemies – on normal difficulty, your own character has no trouble absorbing bullets. I did so, shouldering my light machinegun and popping occasional shots in a semi-accurate haze around my foe.Ī woollier game might've made that process tiresome, but MoH's shooting is fundamentally crisp and satisfying. It wasn't to be the bunny-hopping hero – it was to provide covering fire. Stymied, I skipped over to my squadmates, who gave me a job. I tried a grenade, only to see it pop apologetically in mid-air. My shooter instincts kicked in, and I went to flank, hopping up and down at a low wall in front of the gun like an impatient, gun-toting whack-a-mole. When MoH isn't trying to ape its peers, it fares a lot better.īack in the Afghan desert, my four-man squad and I were faced with a well-fortified machinegun nest. I aimed a screen-filling sniper-rifle repeatedly, puncturing heads from a kilometre away as my spotter called out targets in a watered down version of Modern Warfare's silky 'one shot, one kill' mission. As decreed by ancient law or something, I was forced to direct shots fired by everyone's favourite military namedrop, God's own giant fucking plane o'guns – an AC130.
The first segment of Tier One missions are Call of Duty rejects, cod-CoD gimmicks that get used once or twice then tossed. Prior to the stand in the desert, Medal of Honour isn't sure what it is. By the time I was stuck in the bed of a valley with my Ranger squad, tributaries of Taliban forming a river of pissed-off militants, I'd lost my cynical critical connection, and was genuinely wishing for evacuation. Much more and I'd have broken out whooping “USA! USA!” Tough to explain to the office.
For a short while following that ambush, every “OO-RAH!” that I'd otherwise have winced at became a statement of intent, every kill-shot a revenge strike for the unfair murder of my pretend buddies. My helicopter ride downed, I felt a minuscule approximation of the confusion and panic EA's co-opted soldiers mentioned in their pre-game primers. In the combat boots of the Ranger, the rocks and dust of Afghanistan itself seemed to want to kill me, twatting mortar strikes and RPG fire into my landing point.
Before, I was an extension of the nighttime scenery, silently killing in the dark. Halfway in, you get control of an Army Ranger – a more typical grunt. The first section of the game is in the secret shoes of Tier One operators, and feels resolutely retro in its approach: four men versus the world.