Medal of Honor

    Quote

    people like to buy FPS games… No matter how good or shitty they are. Just market them right and here you go.

    Nuff said...

    I guess that means there's a sequel on the way.

    I guess I'm with Mazy on this one. I'm only a couple hours into the SP campaign, and it's decently competent as I like the voice acting and some other little details, but overall I have also found it to be buggy, graphically a bit less pretty but I can forgive that, and also it's a bit confusing of where to go.

    Let me expand on the last point. In the history of shooters, part of the fun is not just shooting things but the actual navigation of a 3D space to figure out where to go and how to progress. This is inherent in every shooter and linear action game. A single player war game like MoH or CoD shouldn't be full of jumping and physics puzzles the way Half Life2 is, but the sense of exploration, even if fairly linear in design, is generally a good thing and in shooters it just comes with the territory. Games like Half Life 2 and MW2 are both essentially linear experiences, and they both work very well in the sense of exploration but in different ways.

    The issue with Medal of Honor is not that it's linear, it's that it's not always clear where to go to the point of it getting very frustrating...partly due to the bugs. This helps to ruin the sense of exploration and detracts from the sense of immersion. Getting a little confused from time to time isn't a big deal and I wouldn't fault MoH for that. The fault lies in little moments where a squadmate magically pops under a doorway ahead of you and disappears...and somehow that door is supposed to open to let you progress...but you're running around the level thinking "okayyyyyy....my other squadmates are just crouching, waiting for me to do something and telling me to get moving...okayyyyy...now what?"

    Another point early in the game we cleared out a hangar, and my squadmate and I were on some elevated platform/room inside the hangar and Mother or Preacher or whomever said "All clear" or something and kept telling me to move on. He was blocking the doorway ahead and there was no way I could get past him. I kept pushing up against him in his crouch just to see if the AI was smart enough to figure it out but it wasn't. So I had to backtrack a little and go downstairs to another opening that I hadn't known was their at first simply because I just rain up the stairs guns blazing which was pretty cool at the time. This is a minor nitpick, but I ran into stuff like this frequently.

    Again it doesn't make the game an epic fail for me, just a bummer. I can forgive slightly dated graphics or "brown" art direction (it's Afghanistan...aren't we going to see a lot of brown and grittiness?) but the AI really got on my nerves.

    And then there is the shooting gallery issue of the enemies. Coming of beating the Halo Reach campaign, I got used to the AI being generally very good and not just a shooting gallery. Halo games are known for that. With MoH even on normal difficulty I expected a bit less of the shooting gallery. It's still satisfying and it's not the worst AI in a modern shooter ever, but it just felt so unrealistic.

    Again (again) this isn't killing MoH for me, as I really want to like the game and the Afghanistan setting is interesting to me even with whatever controversy came with it in the press. I know it's just a game and bugs and all, when I play it my thoughts go to "the real soldiers in Afghanistan must have a very tough, tough job and I would never want to go to war." I don't even know how authentic it is 'cause I am no soldier but it does at least leave me with a sense of respect for the real operators over there.

    But as a game... :neutral:

    I realize my last post will essentially get a tl;dr in response, but I decided to play the SP all the way through. It's pretty short and yep, buggy. And at many points it takes control away from the player via in-game first person cutscenes in moments where I felt like I wanted more control. Or it uses diminished control as a gameplay mechanic. A lot of other games do that, too, and in MoH it definitely frustrated me. So for those "less than 85%" etc. review scores I get it.

    But you know, overall I actually enjoyed it despite everything above. I guess it grew on me.

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