Medal of Honor (PC) > Reviews (6)

MEDAL OF HONOR is a first-person shooter set in modern day Afghanistan. It was released in 2010 and is, at the time of writing, the latest in the Medal of Honor series. The singleplayer element is created by Danger Close on the Unreal Engine, specifically the third iteration, and the multiplayer by DICE of Battlefield fame, using their Frostbite 2 engine to develop it.

Gameplay

The gameplay of Medal of Honor is simply ‘fine’, it’s nothing ‘spectacular’, and it felt far too panicked, especially when the only person firing was a militant on lower ground with the aim of a child with a broken arm and no firearm training. I guess what I’m trying to say is that the singleplayer campaign over exaggerates so much that before long it begins to feel incredibly dumb. The singleplayer campaign, even on higher difficulties doesn’t really bear much difficulty, and it uses the whole regenerating health ideal that has recently plagued first person shooters, taking a step away from the franchise that is supposed to be ‘based’ off of.

The gameplay feels more like the Call of Duty series than the previous efforts in the Medal of Honor series, mostly because it attempts to be so tacti-cool, and then on top of that they have added more blood and a slight sprinkling of gore to get the ‘18’ rating, or the ‘Mature’ rating (in the US) that they so desperately crave (surveys show that, rather contrastingly to the specified age, an 18 rating will give you a massive audience of twelve to thirteen year olds).

The multiplayer feels like Call of Duty, with a tiny spin on it. The maps are slightly larger and the objective based gamemodes are slightly more fun than in Call of Duty. I would have wanted a larger part to play with the rare vehicles, as it would have added a new dimension to the fighting, but I don’t really mind that they aren’t that prominent. The multiplayer was better than I would give it credit for, but I felt that the unlock system wasn’t very rewarding (you only unlocked a new weapon every now and again, in between several intervals, known in the game as ‘ranks’). This means that the game eventually begins to feel like a grind that you can never truly complete. This isn’t a good thing, by any means: it’s not entirely game breaking.

What is entirely game breaking however is the hackers and the overpowered weaponry. The starting weaponry with which you are provided cannot hold a candle to the later given weaponry, meaning that those that have been playing longer, or are better at the game are greeted with a massive practical advantage. The hackers, whom have begun to evacuate the game now, would use aimbots and wallhacks (the former a hack that aims and fires for you, almost never missing a shot, and the latter being a hack that lets you see your enemy through walls). These really eradicated the fun from the game at release, but thankfully, as I said, they have (mostly) moved on to the next game to ruin.

Therefore, I think that the gameplay deserves a three out of five, seen as it is nothing out of the average for a modern-day first person shooter, but it’s not resoundingly, tremendously awful either.

Graphics

The Unreal Engine 3 has been used to a fair bit of effect in Medal of Honor, but it is not by any means the most pretty game of the today, and it wasn’t the most pretty game of the day when it was released, either. It’s a shame, because I want a game with artistic potential, while also being set in a war, but this game just proves that the only graphical style that developers want to see in their ‘gritty, depressing, tactical’ games is dark brown, mixed with the occasional grey. Bleak, depressing colours to go with ‘gritty’ and ‘dark’ games I guess.

The lighting effects are nice on occasion, the shadows actually look quite nice, especially as you can have them projected onto your weaponry and onto the entities that populate the game world. This is one of the soft-spots for me with video-games, and I am extraordinarly glad that both the singleplayer and the multiplayer component of the game does have this graphical feature. The specular lighting also helps give objects depth considerably. The textures are also fairly detailed, but they are by no means the best textures that I have ever seen.

Optimization

Optimization is a very important part of graphics in video games. Optimization is making the game run great on all different hardware combinations, both those exceedingly powerful and those that are maybe less so. On my gaming desktop, this game ran smoothly, suffering almost never from stutters, and on my laptop, the singleplayer did also. However, the multiplayer was a different story. The framerate dropped into single and the lower double digits quite regularly, however, DICE are to blame here as their FROSTBITE engine is, although pretty, still not particularly well optimized for PC. One of my major gripes with the multiplayer component is there is no option to turn off dynamic shadowing to increase in-game performance. However, if you have a high end machine, this isn’t something that you need to worry about, as it runs well on anything fairly high end.

The system requirements are as follows:

• Pentium D at 3.2GHz (This is typical for any gaming computer of 2005 or any average computer of 2008
• 2GB RAM (most any recent computer comes with this or more, not netbooks, though)
• 10GB Hard Disk Space (It’s about average for a recent video game)
• 256MB Shader Model 3 graphics card (gaming PCs come with this, some laptops do. Intel integrated chips are not supported. Recommended Nvidia minimum is a 7800, recommended ATi minimum is an X1900)

The desktop (gaming computer) that this game was tested on has the following specs:

• Intel Core i7 920 (2.66GHz)
• 6GB DDR3 RAM
• ATi HD RADEON 4890 (Shader Model 4.1, 1GB)
• 500GB HDD Space.

The laptop that this game was tested on has the following specs:

• Intel Core 2 Duo T6600 (2.2GHz)
• 4GB DDR2 RAM
  Nvidia G105M (Shader Model 4, 512MB)
• 500GB Hard Drive.

Sound

The sound in Medal of Honor presents little to no urgency. The shouting of your squad doesn’t really sound all that demanding or under pressure, the sound of weaponry and bullets flying overhead is unsuitably puny.

It’s not a major gripe that I have with the game. It’s just something that I strongly believe should have been thoroughly better in the game. I’m fairly sure that the phrase isn’t “The first casualty in war is the voice acting.” Therefore, they have no excuse.

Value for Money

At the price that its going for these days, only a year after the game was actually released, you can get a Battlefield 3 beta key, as that is upcoming later this year, and you can get a game that you will probably play for a few hours every now and again. It’s by no means a game that your playtime is going to go into triple digits in hours, but it’s enough of a blast for a dismally small asking price that EA is trying to get, at least in my experience, where I got the game for £5, which is actually quite small for a somewhat recent video game.

Content Watch

This game contains some content that you wouldn’t want children seeing. The extend of the content is listed below

Violence

This game has a fair bit of violence.

• Impact on the body with bullets will generally result in a brief blood splurt
• Corpses stay on the ground
• There is occasional pooled blood
• According to the ratings website, dismemberment is possible, but I have never done it, so it must be hard to do and therefore rare.
• There is a particularly fast knife mode, accompanied with a squishy sound. This isn’t particularly brutal.

Language

The game has some swearing.

• Frequent use of strong language such as ‘f*ck’.
• Frequent use of moderate language such as ‘sh*t’
• Other mild profanities

Content Conclusion

This game really didn’t deserve the ‘18’ rating that it received, and therefore I think that its fine for a thirteen or fourteen year old gamer, but any younger than that probably wouldn’t be all right with the game, nor would it be likely that they are going to enjoy it.

Game Conclusion

The game may be a little problematic or boring at points, but there are times when you just want a quick blast where it can be a good bit of fun. The multiplayer gamemodes offer some entertainment and the singleplayer is a brain-less shooter. It’s nothing particularly fast or fun most of the time, but if you want just a cheap little multiplayer shooter with an attached singleplayer campaign then this is worth at least a few minor pennies of your money.

I give this game three of a possible five stars. My conclusive word is ‘Mediocre’.