Although Medal of Honor may have gained column inches for its Taliban/Talibanned controversy, what’s really worth talking about is the game’s excellent multiplayer mode, produced by Battlefield veterans DICE. However, the arena is notoriously competitive – especially with Halo Reach on sale and Call of Duty Black Ops on the horizon – so does Medal of Honor make the online grade? Read on to find out in this part of our Medal of Honor review.
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Medal of Honor review
Medal of Honor review: Is including the Taliban tasteful?
You almost get the impression that Medal of Honor has been designed as a multiplayer game first, with the likeable (but rather underwhelming) solo campaign merely tacked on as an afterthought. This viewpoint is given some validity by the fact that the two sections have been coded independently by different teams. Danger Close took the single player duties while the famous DICE – responsible for the much-loved Battlefield series – was drafted in for online detail.
However, before you dismiss the solo campaign out of hand, it’s worth noting that Danger Close has included a rather nifty “Tier 1” option, which allows you to get competitive with your mates. Although Tier 1 is essentially a solitary experience – where you replay existing campaign missions with massively increased difficulty – it requires an net connection because your performance is recorded online and compared with other players.
This section of Medal of Honor adopts a similar system to Sega’s ambitious but commercially unsuccessful FPS blaster The Club – you’re looking to finish each mission in the quickest time possible, with certain kills freezing the timer for a couple of seconds. The game therefore plays out like an intriguing hybrid of FPS and racing title, with you rushing around each stage in an effort to clean up the enemy and get to the end with a record-breaking time.
As interesting as this mode is, Medal of Honor’s real draw is the DICE-developed portion of the game. Produced using the company’s own proprietary Frostbite game engine – which puts to the shame the visuals seen in the aforementioned single-player portion – it allows up to 24 players to compete simultaneously, participating in urban and desert warfare as either Coalition or Opposing Forces soldiers.
Urban maps can sometimes feel like shooting fish in a barrel. Except you're usually the fish.
There are three classes to pick from in Medal of Honor’s online mode – rifleman, special operations and sniper. Like DICE’s previous titles, there’s a progression system in place which lends a bit of purpose to the carnage. Kills earn you points, medals and ribbons, all of which go towards boosting your ranking in each class. It’s only when you’ve levelled up that you’re able to get your grubby mitts on some of the more advanced weaponry. For example, a rookie sniper isn’t even equipped with a proper scope for their rifle to begin with – this has to be earned by increasing rank.
Staying alive in Medal of Honor’s online mode isn’t easy, especially when you’re on a crowded map. However, the rewards for keeping your pulse going are immense. Should you successfully kill several enemies without biting the bullet yourself, you activate a kill streak bonus. This allows you to call in artillery and air strikes, or boost your team’s armour and resilience.
Of course, the multiplayer mode is also the part of Medal of Honor which generated such a stir in the media recently. The term “Opposing Forces” is used as a replacement moniker for Taliban, and many sectors of the mainstream press were up in arms about the fact that the game effectively allows you to slay allied troops as an insurgent. EA bowed to pressure and repealed the decision just a few weeks before the game went into production, but aside from that alteration the rest of the online component remains untouched.
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In addition to this absurd name-changing, Medal of Honor’s online mode is also hamstring slightly by EA’s insistence on including its Online Pass functionality. Using the code found within the box, players can unlock additional features and weapons. The drawback is that once the code is used by one player, another needs to be purchased should the game find its way into someone else’s hands – say, via the pre-owned section of your local video gaming emporium. It’s a thinly-veiled attempt by EA to undermine the second hand market, but at least the firm stopped short of depriving pre-owned gamers the ability to go online at all.
Like Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Medal of Honor’s online features are impressive. The superb Frostbite game engine holds up brilliantly and the sense of development is tangible, encouraging you to fight through those disappointing initial skirmishes in order to boost your weapons and gain more experience. You can even customise your equipment load-up, applying scopes, red dot sights and other items.
However, Medal of Honor is noticeably inferior to Battlefield: Bad Company 2 in several departments. Because it’s just one section of a much larger overall game, it lacks many of the killer elements that made Bad Company 2 so compelling. Environments are only partially destructible, and some of the maps – such as the war-torn city of Kabul – are quite small, turning especially busy matches into chaotic death-traps where no player survives for more than a few seconds.
Despite its shortcomings, Medal of Honor’s online mode manages to comfortably overshadow the single-player experience, not only in graphical terms, but in satisfaction and playability. It’s not as robust as Halo Reach and one could argue that Bad Company 2 owners already have a superior game on their shelf, but that shouldn’t detract from the sterling job achieved by DICE.
Read the rest of our Medal of Honor review now
Medal of Honor review
Medal of Honor review: Is including the Taliban tasteful?
