PC

  News 
  Reviews
  Previews
  Hardware
  Interviews
  All Features

Areas

  3DS
  Android
  iPad
  iPhone
  Mac
  PC
  PlayStation 3
  PlayStation 4
  Switch
  Vita
  Wii U
  Xbox 360
  Xbox One
  Media
  Archives
  Search
  Contests

 

Medal of Honor: Airborne

Score: 92%
ESRB: Teen
Publisher: EA Games
Developer: EA Los Angeles
Media: DVD/1
Players: 1
Genre: First Person Shooter

Graphics & Sound:

The WWII shooter genre is overdone at best. The Medal of Honor and the Call of Duty camps have been largely in a two front battle with each other for years. There have been small insurgencies of other titles poking their nose into the fray from time to time, but mostly the two big dogs have been at the head of the pack, with new Call of Duty titles actually going away from the shrinking WWII popularity, thank God. The Medal of Honor camp has released Medal of Honor: Airborne. This new campaign drops you literally into the heart of the action. Death from above in grand order. Even though I was all for being the pallbearer to the WWII FPS funeral, I was greatly surprised to find myself really drawn into this game.

Well, I guess that when most of your maps are at night, then everything looks better in the dark. All joking aside, the look is dirty and gritty, as one would expect. Now, this is one area of the game in which I just felt an overwhelming sense of constant deja vu, because they do overuse a lot of textures and assets. The part I didn't quite grasp is that there were no in-game controls for the graphics quality. It is what it is. Animation-wise, I had several occurrences where the animations would some how jumble up and characters would have weird running animations. In all, it had a good look and immersive feeling.

The soundtrack had all of the epic march music you could expect, and then some. Don't misunderstand my intent here. The music does, and always has, made you feel like you were playing a WWII movie. I think this is a great addition. The voiceovers actually added to this movie insertion feeling. They were campy and plastic, but entertaining.


Gameplay:

You start out your military career in Medal of Honor: Airborne as Boyd Travers. You, along with the 82nd Airborne unit, will embark on seven campaigns of WWII. So what would compel anyone to jump from a perfectly good airplane? Strategic advantage, that's why. By entering the battlefield from above, you have an opportunity to choose how you go about your mission. I would suggest not dropping directly into enemy-infested areas as you will not be around as long as you think. The areas you can land in safely are conveniently marked with green smoke. Once on the ground, you need to join up with other ground forces and work your way into each target. Cover is key as you will not be able to just GI Joe your way through the enemy as you once were in earlier games. Fire from cover, watch your flanks and cook your grenades.

The battle upgrades system allows you to gain advantages on the battlefield as you progress. Specific tasks of heroism such as Head Shots, Melee Kills and Dispatching Three or Five enemies at one time will give you upgrades that are instantly added to your weapon. Benefits such as faster reload times and other speed ups save valuable time on the battlefield.

Now what would Medal of Honor: Airborne be without a killer MP section. And it is camper, err... I mean killer. No doubt veterans of the series are all too familiar with the old arguments with the multiplayer system. Doesn't look like much has changed here. There is a terrific new dynamic to take advantage of here, but I will save my soap box for the mechanics section below.


Difficulty:

The difficulty in Medal of Honor: Airborne has a very wide range. There are three difficulty settings with Casual, Medium and Expert. My feeling was that each of the settings had to do with how quickly the enemy registered your movements. On Expert, the A.I. seemed to be almost precognisant about your location, but there are several things for them to key off of and track you. Before, it was easy enough to run past an enemy to then turn and shoot them. Here there will be little of that.

A well-done Melee system will have the computer attack you the second you get into melee range. This has a great way of scaring the hell out of you if you do not pay attention to the enemy's location. You had better learn to be just as quick with your melee as your trigger finger.

Where you decide to land also plays a huge part in how much resistance or how hard the going is for you. Choose wisely and take your time to move forward. With a more open-ended mission approach, there is no end to the oncoming horde making it more difficult to just catch your breath.


Game Mechanics:

So Medal of Honor: Airborne may have started out as a typical WWII shooter experience, but the A.I. for the computer-controlled characters and a few tweaks have made this a very interesting game. With that being said, it is these very same issues that also created some of the largest problems overall. Let us start with the A.I., or artificial intelligence, which is how the computer players react to you. There was the occasional feeling that they would just know you were there. And how come my teammates always look lost? Their favorite thing in the world to do is to walk in front of me once I have opened fire. I would take a covered position, and they would stand in front of me in the open, just to be in the line of fire. I would say that this was a feature to get people to recognize targets and watch for your teammates if it wasn't just so ignorant sometimes. I had numerous times where my teammates would try to stand on me.

Moving on from there, you had this wonderful dynamic of being able to parachute into an area. This was, of course, their whole premise for the game. So, why did this barely carry over into the multiplayer arena? My first death in Multiplayer was spawning in and getting shot immediately by someone in my spawn point. There are maps in which one side and one side only can parachute in. This is all very historically accurate, but if you have a dynamic that can for the better part of all time shut people up about spawn camping by allowing them to jump out and find their own place to land, then I would say use it.

After all of the smoke has cleared here, and after all the ammunition is spent, there are enough meritable fixes and features to make this an above average game. Sure I picked on it a little, but the fact is that is more than a basic WWII FPS. There will always be room for improvement, and hopefully the game will catch on well enough to warrant the team time to go back and clean things up. But in the end, I really had a more immersive and open feeling game than ever.


-WUMPUSJAGGER, GameVortex Communications
AKA Bryon Lloyd

Minimum System Requirements:



Operating System: Windows XP SP2, Processor: 2.8 GHz Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon XP 2800+, Memory: 1GB RAM,Video Card: NVIDIA Geforce 6600GT (Some slower GPUs with higher model number's also not recommended.) ATI Radeon X1300PRO ,Video Card Memory: 128MB RAM, Operating System: Windows Vista, Processor: 3.0 GHz Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon 64 3800+, Memory: 1GB RAM
 

Test System:



Windows XP Pro, 3.2 GHz P4HT CPU, 2 GB Ram, 512 PCIE 16 ATI X1600XT

Microsoft Xbox 360 Dynasty Warriors Gundam Nintendo DS Worms: Open Warfare 2

 
Game Vortex :: PSIllustrated