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

So the Battlefield 3 reveal was leaked and so was the DLC?!? (A DLC rant)

We all knew Battlefield 3 was coming. It was inevitable that DICE was going to follow up it's extremely popular Battlefield 2 with a proper Battlefield game. Bad Company 1 and 2 were okay but they were console Battlefield games not the type we were use to on the PC.

But that besides the point while BF3 was announced/leaked another part of the game was leaked also. That would be the DLC, yeah that's right the game isn't even "Officially" announced and we already know about the DLC coming out for it. It appears to be a reworking of some classic Battlefield maps that you can get for free if you pay the extra money and get the special edition of the game. Or you can just get the normal version and pay extra down the line for these maps.

This DLC stuff is getting out of hand. It isn't uncommon for many games now to have day one DLC and most times you need to pay for it. So you have to lay down 60 bucks for a game and then another 5-10 bucks for the release day DLC if you want to be on par with the other players. Why don't the companies just start adding in this stuff and just do what they all want to and charge more for the game?

Remember when the NES came out and some of those games could be super expensive? Some SNES and Genesis games where 80-90 dollars. Then the CD format became standard with the PS1 and Saturn and those games could be 30-40 dollars, especially the games from Sony themselves. Now we're at 60 or 70 depending on if you need the special edition of a certain game. What will it be like next generation? Will all games be 70 bucks, maybe 80?

While I think the game companies are to blame for just being in general a little greedy, we the gamer are to blame too. Rushing out to pay the initial 60 bucks then paying for every little bit of DLC just let's the companies know we'll pay for it. If we just took a step back and didn't buy every set of horse armor or dog breed that we're offered maybe said companies will take a step back and think before they hold stuff back from the game disc and try to sell it to us later on. How many times have you paid for a DLC package and the download is only a few kilobytes, just an unlock for "DLC" that's already on the disc? How can they get away with this crap?

EA is getting really good with the DLC thing. I remember reading a April fools thing in Game Informer a couple years ago and they were joking that EA was going to start making the air from the footballs in Madden DLC but I don't think we're far off from that. Activision is to blame too with their 15 dollar map pack crap. Modern Warfare 2 was the first to have this ridiculous price for maps and 2 of them were old maps from COD4! Why do people pay this? It boggles my mind!

I'm not innocent in this, I've bought DLC before, I've bought DLC I never played. After I bought the first add-on for Red Faction: Guerrilla and never got around to actually playing it I realized what an utter waste buying that stuff was. Since then I haven't bought any DLC, no add-ons, no map packs, nothing. I am one hundred percent against the practice and I will NEVER buy any of this crap again. Anyone reading this should follow suit and do the same. Show the big game companies that we won't pay for stuff that should be included in the main game and maybe they'll go back to actually giving us what our 60 bucks should pay for in the first place.

Second Look: Medal of Honor Beta

The last time I wrote about the Medal of Honor Multiplayer Closed Beta I basically said it was crap and I stand by that statement. Back in July when I was trying to play this it was glitchy and pretty much just broken. If you're interested in my thought of the game back then here's the link to that article.

http://withrpgelements.blogspot.com/2010/07/some-thoughts-on-medal-of-honor-pc-beta.html



With the actual release of Medal of Honor coming out this week EA had the open beta to help test the servers for the multiplayer. After hating the game during the summer I decided to give it another shot and downloaded the new beta and tried it out.

I can say that a lot of the problems have been fixed and the game is actually playable and guess what? It's actually fun to play! My main gripe with the original beta was the hit detection, you could head shot a dude, watch their head kick back and spray blood all over the place all from point blank range and they wouldn't take the hit and probably kill you. This was completely fixed you point your gun at someone and shoot and if the shot is lined up and your aim is good you hit them! It's like playing a working shooter!

The other thing that was crap was the game crippling lag. I know it was a beta but the game lagged so bad it was extremely tough to play. Sometimes I thought the lag was the problem with the hit detection but even when the game was running with zero lag the hit detection was still there. In the open beta the lag was pretty much gone and the game ran really smoothly.

As the first beta this one looks fantastic and manages to keep up a decent frame rate with all the setting turned up all the way (I'm was playing this on the PC). Medal of Honor is a great looking game, I'm extremely impressed with the way it looks.

The unlock system for the multiplayer is still the same. The unlocks are class dependent which I'm not a fan of but it's just what DICE does with it's multiplayer games.

There is another big change that doesn't affect gameplay, EA decided to remove the Taliban from the multiplayer. Now they're the Opposing Forces, yay! I was shocked in the first beta when I noticed they were the Taliban but I thought EA and DICE had some balls for putting them in the game and I applauded the edginess of it. I'm really disappointed they removed the Taliban as everything about the game is showing the current war except for who you're fighting. That's just crazy denial and I would of loved to see EA stand it's ground and keep a real villain in the game.


In the end after the first beta I wrote of the new Medal of Honor as just garbage and another me too Call of Duty clone. After last weeks open beta I think the game has a chance to be really good, again while it still feels like Call of Duty Lite I think it can hold it's own in the FPS jungle. Especially with so many people jaded by Modern Warfare 2 this may help the overall sales and get people to play this one. I'm still extremely interested in the single player but I don't like the idea of a 60 dollar PC game. Maybe if they lower the price or there is a sale for the game on Steam I'll grab it, I just can't bring myself to pay 60 bucks for a PC game.

Medal of Honor to come with Battlefield 3 beta invite.

So as I'm reading about this I can only think one thing. EA has realized that the new modern reboot of the Medal of Honor franchise is a giant pile of garbage. They need some way to make people still care about this game. For them releasing a beta was probably the worst thing they could of done because all it did was show the community how bad the game was before it came out. This is what EA gets for spreading DICE so thin, developing different games at the same time. I'm guessing that DICE was working on Battlefield 3 at the same time as MOH so one of them had to suffer. DICE hasn't been the best when it comes to getting their games perfect right at launch as they usually have to release several different patches to get everything in proper working order. So now that nobody really cares about MOH EA has taken some steps to help sell the game. First was making a special edition that's just the regular game with added in weapons like in previous DICE games but with this one EA isn't charging more just giving the weapons away. But that wasn't enough so they whisper out, "Hey buy this and get access to, wait for it... BATTLEFIELD 3!" So now everyone is probably creaming themselves over the awesomeness they hope BF3 will be but you need to buy this garbage MOH to get on the hot beta action. I for one can wait because the DICE of recent memory hasn't been up to snuff as far as games have gone. For me DICE hit their climax with Battlefield 1942 and everything went down hill from there. Vietnam was an unbalanced piece of crap and I never played Battlefield 2 but I've heard good things about that one so I can give it a pass. Next you had all the console BF games which failed to grasp the PC BF experience so they can all blow. Bad Company 1 had a great single player campaign as it was nice to play a war FPS that didn't take itself to seriously, then BC2 which pretty much ignored the whole first game had the most bland, plain war story I've ever seen. The multiplayer for both of these games was just screaming, "Hey look at us! We're almost he PC BF games but we're not quite there yet!" But I don't really know it's just this whole MOH thing has left a bad taste in my mouth and I don't want to see the game do well just because it has a BF 3 beta included with it.