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Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Danger Close: Medal of Honor Review

Medal of Honor started as a series that defined the World War 2 shooter. For a long time it was the only good WW2 game out there. Then Call of Duty came along and took all the great stuff Medal of Honor did and improved on it. After COD took over the reigns from MOH it focused on the modern times and many other franchises tried to catch up to them. Eventually Medal of Honor followed along and with that we get the new Medal of Honor.

The 2010 edition of Medal of Honor takes place during the War in Afghanistan and it never pulls any punches about that fact. You play as several different characters over 2 days during the conflict but for the majority of the game you'll control "Rabbit" a member of the Tier 1 APO Neptune squad. You also spend a good part of the game playing as "Deuce" a Sniper for AFO Wolfpack who runs along the guy from the cover of the game whose name I can't remember and I don't really want to look up.

From the story prospective the game isn't ever really clear on what's going on. You just seem to be going along killing guys and getting extracted but I'll go into that more later on.

Gameplay wise MOH is a modern wartime first person shooter. It's plays a lot like the other Modern FPS games on the market. You can carry two guns at a time and have an assortment of grenades to use. You use all the modern weapon hotness through out, M-14s, shotguns and the .50 caliber sniper rifle. At it's core it is a really by the numbers shooter, if you've played any other modern shooter you know what you're getting into.

The game does control decently, mouse aiming feels good and I didn't really have any issues with killing guys. The one complaint about the control set up is so many things are spread to far around the keyboard. I had to do a ton of rebinding on my keys to get stuff closer to my movement keys and that to me just screams lazy PC port because they just threw the keys where ever. It is cool in this time of not letting us bind keys they allowed us to do so, so we do have that.

I really liked the way the game looked. Danger Close did a great job making the game look pretty. The sand and mountains look really nice as you're playing. One of my complaints about Black Ops was the guns looked like crap while the rest of the game looked good. It is not the case here the guns look good, the environments look good. I have an older PC and I could play this at max settings no problem.

It may feel like I just kind of glossed over most of the game but it really is a by the book military FPS. With that said I have some complaints and they're the big focus of this review.

First up the story, it never made any sense. I'm guessing there is a story here somewhere but for the most part it's just a squad of soldiers killing dudes and trying to get somewhere. The first level looks like it's trying to set up an attempt at a narrative but after that it never goes anywhere. I can see a military game without the big time Call of Duty type story just being about some guys and doing their jobs over a couple days but this isn't it. MOH keeps trying to make everything you do a big deal but it isn't important to me when it's not really explained or fleshed out.

MOH also suffers from repetition and I mean a lot of it. Here's the game broken down in a few words. First off you need to go somewhere, you get there and need to hold that point, you "Paint" a target which is always "Danger Close" and BOOM! Then you need to wait for extraction and you do this for almost the entire game. It's broken up with some sniper parts and a riding a quad runner but that's the whole game.

The two biggest gripes with this game, it's too short and it's WAY too easy. I beat the game on the hard mode in about 4 hours! What the hell? Hard mode is suppose to be hard but this game's hard mode wasn't even tough, it had a few tricky parts but it still only took 4 hours. It's inexcusable that a game would come out and cost 60 bucks and only be 4 hours long. That to me just says this game was released for multiplayer and the single player was an after thought. Boo-Urns to Danger Close and EA for doing that! I paid 10 bucks for this in the last Steam sale and I feel a little ripped off, I would of been furious if I'd paid the full 60.

So I mentioned the multiplay, what did I think? I didn't even bother. I played the Beta and it was bland as hell and I didn't want to waste anytime with it.

In the end Medal of Honor is fun but we've all seen what it does before. It doesn't really try anything new and I fear this will not bode well for the series. If Danger Close (Who are working on a sequel) try to make a more original game instead of trying to be the next COD then I think they can make a great shooter. If you can get this cheap or rent it you'll have fun. It will scratch your FPS itch but again it will feel like deja vu.


Medal of Honor - 5 out of 10

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