The Medal of Honor (MoH) series is known for its über-high production values. The previous PC games in the series, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (MoH:AA) and Medal of Honor: Allied Assault: Spearhead, both provided amazing player experiences. While other first-person shooter (FPS) games tend to pit a solitary protagonist against, oh, the whole universe, the MoH series put the player in the midst of a small squad caught up in huge events. The Normandy Beach invasion from MoH:AA still stands out in my mind as one of gaming's finest moments, for I can think of few equally memorable sequences. Needless to say, Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault (MoH:PA) has some pretty big shoes to fill right from the start.
Happily, the visuals fill those shoes while remaining true to the spirit of the franchise. The environments are positively stunning. Not even Battlefield Vietnam (BFV) or Far Cry (FC) provide jungle this realistic in my view. It's true that both of those games look amazing, BFV with its sprawling Vietnam landscapes and FC with its huge tropical islands, but MoH:PA gets still more little details exactly right, details that make the experience genuinely new. The Guadalcanal mission should win some kind of award for its atmosphere alone, for seeing Jap soldiers come streaming out of the fog rising from the stream is truly gripping.
The character modeling is very good, save perhaps for the general artistic choice to give soldiers arms a bit too long for their bodies, and the texture work is fabulous. In a wonderfully subtle touch, each of the persistent characters in the game picks up scars and wounds as the game goes on, which alter their appearance. At the beginning of the game the protagonist is a fresh-faced recruit, but by the game's ending he is a grubby, scarred, battle-hardened soldier. It's a really nifty touch, and I applaud the developers for including it. Seriously, the squad looks like they age and grow ever wearier as the war drags on, and that adds feeling to the game.
But perhaps the crowning achievement of the game, in terms of its visuals, is its emphasis on high-quality special effects. The developers have pulled out all the stops with MoH:PA. When the player is taken out of the action, for example, the display shifts to a black and white mode with some sort of "softening" effect, which gives a seriously dream-like quality to the situation. Firing an emplaced machine gun blurs the player's vision, simulating the atmospheric distortion of heat emanating from the gun's barrel. Firing an anti-aircraft gun shakes and blurs the display, as one might expect when firing something so powerful. There's even a subtle "eyes-adjusting" effect when pulling out or putting away the binoculars.
I don't think any other game I've seen goes to such great lengths to put graphical shaders to such good use. The focus on quality is so overwhelming that it's only after playing for a while that I could settle down and stop noticing the little touches. Truly the visuals are wonderfully and powerfully done, giving the player a visual experience like nothing that has come before in the World War II (WWII) FPS game.
But, of course, such beauty comes at a price. Unlike Half-Life 2 (HL2), MoH:PA bogs down on even fast machines. Granted, I was playing it at 1280 x 1024 x 32 bpp with 8x anisotropic filtering (AF) enabled, but I was able to play HL2 at that same resolution with 4x anti-aliasing (AA) enabled as well and still enjoyed better frame rates. I can't seem to get AA to work at all with MoH:AA, which results in a few issues with the jaggies, but it remains playable and looks good nevertheless. No doubt MoH:PA will improve with age, insofar as the next generation of video hardware should truly do it justice. Those with older cards should investigate whether AA will work with the game; I can't imagine it running well beyond 1024 x 768 on such cards and that means lots of jaggies.
The audio is everything we've come to expect from a MoH game. The music is wonderful, the dialogue is high quality, and the sound effects are absolutely first rate. Further, the implementation is absolutely flawless. I didn't have any stuttering issues, volume balance issues, or any other issues for that matter. In fact, the only negative thing I can think to say is that some of the lines grow a bit old after a while. I got pretty tired of my squad mates yelling about how I should "get a grenade on that guy", but that's a pretty minor complaint. Suffice it to say that the audio is stellar.
The interface is pretty standard fare, though I do think it leaves a couple of things to be desired. All the basic functions are in place, the menu system is nicely done (if a bit obviously console-ish in nature), and keys and such are easily configured. I do wish, however, that it was possible to separate jumping from raising one's stance; i.e., I would much prefer to be able to bind stance up/down functions to keys separate from the jump key. I also suspect that the aiming function would be better off on the right mouse button by default, given the relatively scarce options for making use of alternate fire. Overall, though, the interface gets the job done, and that's all that really matters.
The game mechanics are a mixed bag. On the one hand, most of the traditional FPS mechanics are all in place: the player can run or walk in different stances, fire, aim and fire, interact with objects in the world, and so forth. But this time around the MoH series has ditched the more typical reliance on health packs, canteens, and the like in favor of a squad-level corpsman with a limited number of player uses. Though I think this is an interesting innovation, and one generally deserving of praise, some AI problems prevent it from being entirely functional.
The basic idea is that the player can hit a key to call for the corpsman when he is injured. And if everything goes well, the corpsman will come to the player and fuss over him for a brief period of time during which the player is completely unable to do anything but look around. When the corpsman is done with his ministrations, the player will return to full health and can get back into the action. The corpsman carries enough equipment to heal the player four times, so while the mechanic does make it possible to recover completely it must be used sparingly.
The problem is that this mechanic doesn't always work correctly. I've died more times than I can count because the corpsman fails to get to me in time, sometimes because he's stuck on the terrain and sometimes because he's too busy doing something else. It seems that there's a limited window of opportunity for him to get to the player before death occurs. And, of course, if the enemy gets to the player first then all bets are off. The first few times one sees a Jap soldier walk calmly forward and administer a bullet to the head it's neat; after that it gets pretty old.
It's also a little odd that none of one's squad mates ever die. In previous MoH games, there was always a great deal of emotional impact to the war. Seeing my comrades get killed was always a sad thing, even when I knew it was coming and even if I couldn't be bothered to care too much about them as individuals. But in MoH:PA the corpsman will heal squad mates any number of times, no matter how badly they're hit. It adds a certain unwelcome unreality to the game for my tastes. I guess it's better than the alternative, punishing the player when his teammates get themselves killed, but isn't there some kind of happy medium to be found?
I should also note that the general weapon mechanics have been adjusted pretty radically from prior games in the series, and they bear little resemblance, in my experience at least, to the way weapons work in pretty much any other FPS game. If I had to pick a single word to express what I mean, it would be 'slow'. The weapons in MoH:PA are slow to bring to bear, slow to aim, slow to fire, and excruciatingly slow to reload. This isn't a game wherein it's possible to slap a full new clip into a gun and be ready to rock and roll in a heartbeat. Not at all. Reloading some of the weapons takes quite a few seconds, which can be a virtual eternity in combat—particularly when the Japanese are going banzai. Even the trajectory of thrown grenades seems a bit weird compared to other games.
I have to admit that I didn't like these changes at first, but the more I played the more I liked what the developers have achieved. Because the weapons are slower, the pace of each individual confrontation is quite different than in other games. A simple battle for a single outpost can stretch into minutes. This bothered me at first, but over time I grew accustomed to it and actually came to enjoy it. It seems more "real" somehow than other games, in which I could race forward into harm's way and blast enemies to bits before my AI-powered teammates could even catch up with me. The result is that combat becomes more interesting, if always a bit lengthier.
The awarding of medals returns from the previous games in the series, and the addition of "hero moments" is a nice extension thereof. It was pretty cool to be able to look around Tommy's foot-locker, remembering moments from specific battles. Kudos too are deserved for the ability to launch directly into the mission where said mementos are earned. At the moment the medal system is quite buggy (i.e., even when I've completed all the hidden objectives required for the medal I still don't get it), but one can hope for a fix in a future patch.
In summary, the game mechanics are pretty well done overall, even though they do have a few flaws and take some time to grow into before they will feel natural. Still, I think the learning curve is worthwhile, and I congratulate the developers for trying some new things.
Story? There's a story? Ok, that's not quite fair. Most developers seem to think that any game set in WWII requires no story; they can simply focus on whatever battles they're including and let the larger backdrop of the war serve as a story. MoH:PA tries, albeit to a very limited extent, to make the player care about the individuals on the team by providing a number of interesting and/or humorous cut-scenes between missions.
The problem is that they're all occupied with moments that are never fully realized. The "humorous" bits just aren't all that funny. The "touching" bits just aren't all that touching. Many of the cut scenes lack the clearly-intended emotional impact for whatever reason. They're nicely done, so I don't understand quite why they seem to fall short. Maybe I'm overly critical? I don't know.
To be clear, I'm not bothered much by this, largely because the game is otherwise so compelling. But I know that some gamers really want a coherent and convoluted story in order to take a game seriously. There is no such story in MoH:PA, but it's not a serious omission.
Wow! Some of the content in MoH:PA is absolutely amazing. I should observe, for sake of honesty, that I have something of a personal connection to this game. My paternal grandfather served during WWII and, if I can believe the stories I've been told, the only reason he didn't die at Pearl Harbor was because he was in a land-based prison after getting into a bar brawl the night before. When the bombs tore into the Arizona, on board which I'm told he served as a machinist, he was busy waking up with a hangover on dry land, perhaps the only time that his excessive drinking turned out to be a good thing.
True or false, it's what I've grown up with. And so I was moved, to say the least, when I had the privilege of visiting the Arizona memorial at Pearl Harbor in 1994. Over fifty years later the old girl was still leaking fuel. The grainy films of the attack, seeing the wall with the names of the men who died, visiting the submariners memorial, and all the other bits of my trip to Oahu came back to me as I played this game. I literally couldn't avoid tears at seeing the Arizona jump from the explosions that ripped her apart. I manned the gun aboard that little patrol boat through teeth clenched from pure hatred. And it reminded me of my grandfather, God rest his soul, and how he came so close to dying young from the sneak attack that entangled my nation in that war.
You just can't buy anything better than that in gaming as far as I'm concerned. Those are the moments that stay with you. Maybe I'm overly sentimental in approaching this game. I honestly can't say. What I can say, though, is that I will never forget the sequence at Pearl Harbor as long as I live. It gave me a chance to feel like I was connected to the men who were there that day, like I understood a tiny fraction of what they must have felt at seeing those big ships burn. I wouldn't trade that for the world.
Yet not all in MoH:PA is so over-the-top great. For example, the island sequences really seem to drag out after a while. I gave up counting the number of twisty turns in the jungle on the Makin Atoll, and although the Tarawa section of the single-player campaign somehow didn't seem so repetitive, it was at least similar. It's not that the island sequences are bad, mind you, it's just that I got kind of tired at the degree of repetition.
It also doesn't help that the AI makes at least one sequence on Tarawa a living hell, and for all the wrong reasons. It's the mission where you've got to clean out the Japs from a system of tunnels while blowing a bunch of big guns, taking down a tank with a "portable" anti-tank weapon that can't be moved, and ultimately assaulting a tank-proof bunker that the player has to blow with a satchel charge. Then, once the bunker is blown, the squad has to get up to the top of it and hold off wave after wave of assaulting Japs.
It's just not a good situation because the AI (1) constantly gets in the way in the tunnels, (2) gets in the way of sniping above ground, (3) won't return the fire of Japs who are busy killing you, and (4) can't seem to find it in themselves to provide the cover necessary to get any healing or reload at the very end. In short, it can be a miserable mission, and I can't help but wonder why it was included in its shipping configuration, given how frustrating and/or useless the player's AI-powered teammates can be.
Oh, and speaking of including the unwanted, how about those opening movies? Games are getting downright absurd in this respect, and MoH:PA sets a new standard in absurdity. Upon launching the game one is given the configuration screen, which must be acknowledged every time to the best of my knowledge. Then comes the EA Games "challenge everything" video, followed by the MoH:PA title screen, the THX audio bit, a clip that amounts to an advertisement for Intel, and finally the idiotic ESRB notice. Count 'em, fellow gamers: that's no less than six stupid screens to wade through, none of which can be skipped. What's next, developers, five minutes of commercials before we can play? Sheesh. Knock this crap off and let us skip them all.
My final complaint (honest!) is one I seem to be making a lot these days: it's way too short. I finished the single-player campaign in less than nine hours, and I made my way through it pretty carefully. I'll bet the whole thing could be finished by a more daring player in maybe six hours. That's not a lot of entertainment value for a game that's selling for $54.99, certainly not when compared with other games of late that provide quite a bit more play and greater replay value to boot.
First, let me curse the developers for a particularly idiotic bit of BS, namely, that I couldn't even get into the multi-player aspect of the game for days. Why? Because of their authentication garbage. Yes, folks, it's another case of the legitimate customers getting screwed for no good reason. The pirates were having no problem playing; I know this from the comments I read on various web-based message boards while looking for a crack. But I, the paying customer, couldn't get into the multi-player game because (1) it requires an EA Games account to play, and (2) their stupid servers wouldn't let me create an account. Take note, developers: your damnable copy-protection and authentication garbage stops only paying customers, not pirates.
When I eventually was able to create an account and get into the multi-player menu, I was disappointed to find the game buggy and laggy, even on servers with a fast connection. The dumbest bug I saw was that the blurred vision distortion effect that occurs when firing an emplaced gun stays with you if you stop using it before the effect has cleared! Believe me, it's a lot of "fun" running around a server with a permanently blurry view. The first patch released for the game did seem to improve the lag and the server browser, but some of the bugs still remain.
In the plus column, the graphics are beautiful and the slower weapons make for some interesting combat. The basic deathmatch is fun, albeit a bit hectic, but it's really the objective-based mode of the game that caught my eye. It reminds me of a cross between some of the modes from Soldier of Fortune 2 and Call of Duty with a little bit of Star Wars: Battlefront thrown in for good measure. Suffice it to say that one team has to get stuff done while the other has to stop them, which makes for a pretty cool match-up. I've played just less than a dozen hours of multi-player to date, but I'm pretty confident I'll be spending some more time with it before I'm done.
MoH:PA isn't going to redefine multi-player gaming, and it arguably doesn't hold up as well as the previous games in the series in this aspect, but it does provide a respectable set of modes and delivers a good bit of fun. I don't think it's going to take off and have a lot of staying power, but I guess we'll have to wait and see if I'm right.
In summary, MoH:PA is a good game despite its flaws. The single-player aspect is generally a great deal of fun, though it can also be pretty frustrating for reasons already mentioned. The multi-player aspect isn't what I'd call genius, but it does provide some engaging battles. MoH:PA clearly isn't a game that's going to be on my hard drive five years from now, but it is going to enjoy a place for the foreseeable future. As such, I can recommend it to anyone with a fair bit of patience who is looking for a game that delivers a short but intense FPS experience. If you're the sort of person who buys only one game and plays it to death you can probably do better, but most FPS fans won't go wrong with MoH:PA.
12/03/2004