The Plot. There is no plot to speak of, but nevertheless, this game tells a story of three different teams, of which two are elite "Tier 1" units and the third is a ranger unit, apparently also considered elite. You play a part of those teams and also get to fly an Apache as a fourth character.
General thoughts. This is a cinematic First Person Shooter (or FPS). Lots of shooting, lots of action and explosions and you get to tag along with some cool warrior people. Sometimes you get to kick in a door, call in an airstrike in the middle of a fight, shoot some baddies using a really big sniper rifle (The Barrett M82 .50 cal !). You even get to ride around an ATV for a little while.
I am a big fan of all kinds of cinematic shooters, since they make you feel like these things just happen and are not scripted in any way. Normal everyday war-stuff, like someone dislocating a shoulder while taking a dive off a roof after a danger-close air support or a Taliban fighter shooting a chopper out of the sky with an RPG. I especially like the sneaking missions, where you sneak around with a teammate who tells you when to run, when to crawl, when to stop and when to shoot at something. It feels really dangerous and interesting.
The best example of the beginning of cinematic style shooters would probably be Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, which was made by the people who shortly after the release left EA and made their own company which in turn produced the Call of Duty series, which is absolutely the best example of how a cinematic shooter should be like. When the people who made Allied Assault left, the Medal of Honor series suddenly got worse and never regained it's former glory.
With that said, this game delivered in heaps when it comes to cinematic joy. Things like airstrikes, sneaky-missions, even radio chatter during a fight. I think some of the things could have been a bit better, like when a teammate takes out a bad guy using a knife, it could have been a bit more cinematic than him just appearing next to a baddie and sticking a knife in his side.
But pretty and interesting aren't everything. When compared to the Call of Duty series, which is the main rival of the Medal of Honor series, Call of Duty always has really elaborate and interesting story lines, while this Medal of Honor installment doesn't really have a story. Just some special ops messing about on a mountain side, some choppers dropping and some other unrelated stuff. At the very beginning of the game, there was promise of something more than just a story-less shooter. There was something reminding of a plot until the point where you get to take an airfield and make it your base of operations. That's it. From there it's just about some soldiers fighting somewhere in the mountains and constantly whining about how intel was wrong and there are too many bad guys. True. I think I killed about a thousand of them with my teams.
I love how in every in-game cut scene in Call of Duty you get to look around and really get a feeling of being in control of the character. This is something I seriously missed in Medal of Honor. There were a few scenes where the main hero was in a car with a bunch of other people and I couldn't look where I wanted, instead I had to look at what was shown to me.
I liked the part where we got to roll around on ATV-s. It handled like a go-kart, but the idea of that I liked very much. At one point we came up to a ridge and without getting off of the ATV, the character takes out a sniper and starts shooting. That was fun.
The idea of different character episodes being connected in some way was really interesting. Usually different characters in this type of games are separately running around and doing things. In Medal of Honor, there's a sequence, where you desperately try to fight off a bunch of bad guys coming down a hill and just when you're about to run out of ammo and die, two apaches join the fight and get rid of the baddies. The next moment you're in one of the Apaches as a different character and the Apache mission starts. That was also quite interesting. In almost all cinematic shooters, at one point you get to mess around with heavy equipment, like drive a tank, fly a chopper or even be part of a bombing squad on the way to a target. There was even one where you got to fly a fighter plane, but that didn't work very well, since the controls are for shooting and don't work too well flying.
The graphics of Medal of Honor could have been a lot better. It's a bit of a disappointment even. While most of the game looked fine, if not a little bit cramped (mainly due to the lack of a better monitor, me still using a 4:3), the explosions were downright ugly. A lot of dust that didn't look like dust, but more like a thick wall of.. dusty glass and all the explosions looked very two-dimensional.
The last thing I'd like to say about this is that I didn't like the ending. I know, it's supposed to show that there's a sequel coming, but I don't like endings that leave me hanging and wanting for something more out of the story. It just suddenly ended.
In general, if you like cinematic shooters, go ahead, this is worth a shot. It's not long, only about 5-6 hours of gameplay, so you should have plenty of time to play proper games after this is done. But then again, most cinematic shooters are short these days. If you like the Medal of Honor series, you will like this. If you like Call of Duty, give this a shot but don't expect too much.
6/10 Flogs
No comments:
Post a Comment