Medal of Honor: Airborne (PC)
Filed Under Reviews
The Medal of Honor series has laid low on the PC since it had come out to the Pacific theater, dumbing down much of its gameplay with European Assault on consoles, and leaving the Call of Duty series to pick up the slack. But with Airborne, EA has decided to hit back with a game that allows the player to jump and die wherever they might land, putting a new twist to the FPS action of the series. But while it starts off with a bang, it also lasts just as long.
There’s Only One Way Out of This Plane
Airborne puts you into the boots of Boyd Travers, Private First Class of the 82nd Airborne who is going to participate in many of the historical operations that would help win the war for the Allies. From the training camp in North Africa to the final assault, you’ll be jumping and shooting your way through areas filled with the Third Reich’s goose-stepping legions and their allies.
A heavily modified Unreal 3 engine powers the visual candy that you’ll be seeing throughout the game which means that you’ll probably need a fairly powerful box to run this with all of the details maxed. If you can, you’ll be treated to some of the best looking WW2 graphics in a game today with glistening cobblestone streets to the trenches atop Normandy’s cliffs swarming with enemy soldiers. But as far as the explosions look, the flat smoke can stick out like a sore thumb against everything else.
For history nuts, despite the demo replacing its flags with Iron Crosses, the full game is a bit more historically honest, if not accurate. For one thing, the Market Garden scenario gives you the impression that it was a massive success when, in reality, it failed to end the war by Christmas ‘44 as it was hoped. Fortunately for gamers, WW2 in the game is used as more of a backdrop for the action than to teach history.
The weapons bark out their fire with some great effects with the Germans and Italian troops screaming orders at each other in their own lingo making much of the action feel like a slice from a Hollywood big budget film. Physics have also been added to most everything in the game, sending soldiers falling over walls, down stairs, through windows, or into the air. The effects look great, adding a degree of over the top detail to the action.
Most everyone from your fellow airborne to hardened Wehrmacht soldiers will also run, signal, and take cover thanks to the “Affordance” engine, the AI system developed to help make them out to be more than high poly targets. They’ll back off when they need to, charge blindly forward to smash the butt of their rifle into your face, or wait behind cover, but it can also do some strange stuff such as hiding behind an obstacle in view of another airborne soldier who starts taking potshots at them or ignore enemy soldiers as they run around while they focus on you as if you were Schwarzenegger from the 80s.
Anyone familiar with an FPS title on the PC will find the controls easy to get into and there’s plenty to get practice with if this is your first trip behind enemy lines. The biggest changes to the old formula of shooting your way from one end of the map to the next is that as an Airborne trooper, you can pretty much decide where on the map you want to land and start the fight from there after jumping from the plane. And if you’re a little shy about heading through that door, you have nothing to worry when the rest of your unit pushes you into the wild blue as you tumble out. You can also control how you land, either falling on your face or carefully flaring your chute and moving at just the right moment to take off running, adding a great twist to ye olde FPS formula.
Once on the ground, the objectives can be completed in any order that you decide to pursue them in. As objectives are completed, the game saves your progress with a set checkpoint slot that you can’t change. But although it saves your progress, such as what you’ve already blown up, it doesn’t save your position since you parachute back into the game instead. In later levels where this won’t make much sense, you’ll start from where the last checkpoint was saved if it was deep inside a building or well into a lengthy mission. There’s no manual save, other than saving the last checkpoint, or any way to break up your saves into separate files. If you want to relive certain points in a particular mission, you’ll pretty much need to start from the beginning.
Weapons have also been changed. You can decide what you want to carry with you before each mission, whether it’s a rifle, a Thompson submachine gun, or even a German MP40. There’s no real need to worry about ammo too much, although it can be a little odd to find ammo for your BAR after killing a German Fallschirmjager. Two slots are reserved for rifles and automatics, and the last slot is for a trusty sidearm such as the Colt which you start out with. As you progress through each mission, more weapons become available for your arsenal of destruction.
But as you mow down the waves of soldiers in your way, you gain experience with each weapon until you earn enough for an automatic in-field upgrade. Each weapon can be upgraded three times, resulting in faster loading, more accurate sights, and even adding a grenade launcher attachment to a rifle.
Airborne also uses the famous regenerating health system that seems to be the de facto standard for newer FPS titles, but in this case, it breaks it up into four smaller gauges instead of one. As long as a gauge has health, it’ll regenerate. If a gauge is depleted, you’ll need to find one of those old standbys, the health pack, to refill it.
Operation Shortgame
Airborne brings plenty of action to the screen and it gets much of the feel of a Hollywood forged WW2 epic right with in-game cinematics helping to tell what story there is. It nails the atmosphere, but as far as the general gameplay is concerned, while it does put a twist to the FPS formula by allowing players to start nearly anywhere on the map and allow them to upgrade their weapons, it’s also incredibly short.
There are six campaigns that you will be taking part in, but each campaign is pretty much an entire level of gameplay. Once it’s done, it’s on to the next campaign. They aren’t broken up into smaller missions, only objectives, and it can literally take only five to seven hours depending on your difficulty level to tear through the single player. You can go back and repeat the operations that you’ve completed to earn a higher rating or earn more experience for your weapons, but there’s not much else.
This is a shame because early previews and interviews had hinted that each campaign would be divided into two parts with the player taking the role of two different characters with different objectives. Unfortunately, it looks like that it was a feature that didn’t make it into the final code, leaving you with a small number of campaigns that will have you at war’s end in less than a few hours which might not sit well with players that expected more.
There are also gremlins hiding in the game, the kind that have been around FPS land for as long as anyone can remember. The enemy will psychically know exactly where you are hiding. Even if you try and sneak up behind them, they’ll usually turn around at the last minute to bash you in the head thanks to their hyper sensitive hearing. The enemy AI is also allowed to make mistakes with explosives, surviving unscathed when it accidentally lets loose a panzerschreck round that explodes in their face when it hits a crate in front of them.
But the worst part is that they’ll sometimes spawn right in front of you, or into a room that you may have cleared before, utilizing some kind of Nazi wunderweapon to teleport themselves back into the action, turning some areas into virtual clown cars. In one mission, I walked down from a rooftop and it seemed that a scripted reinforcement spawn tripped itself as I entered a room, the soldiers brought in from the ether right in front of me. And it wasn’t the last time, either, that enemy soldiers would prove themselves more adept at appearing from thin air than David Copperfield.
There’s also no way to skip any of the in-game cinematics if you simply want to get on with the mission, and the cover system feels a little loose with the mouse and keyboard. In trying it with the 360’s gamepad, I was able to tweak how far I was able to lean. With the keyboard, you’re either behind cover or leaning completely out of it leaving no middle ground for small tweaks. You also can’t walk and aim using iron sights at the same time since that also ties into the cover system. If you try and move while aiming, you’ll be leaning or crouching instead.
Operation Online
Multiplayer is offered with a maximum of 12 players with a small number of maps to engage each other in a generic selection of options. There’s nothing new in multiplayer that FPS fans have seen before, other than the airborne option where you can drop in from the sky and land anywhere on the map which can put the drop on your enemies as long as they don’t shoot you dead from the sky first. Other than that, performance wasn’t all that great even on cable. It ran smoothly when it worked, but random disconnects, lag, and the small nature of the detailed maps make this feature feel like an afterthought. There was also the one instance where I landed…wrong. That’s as best as I could describe what happened, because apparently, the game had me walking upside down.
There’s also no dedicated server option, at least not yet, although you can start game sessions of your own…as long as you sign into EA. The same requirements goes for signing into regular MP. There also doesn’t seem to be a LAN option in the game so if you’re planning to add this to your party roster of titles, you might be in for disappointment. If you haven’t registered the game yet, it will automatically happen when you sign into EA’s service, registering the game under that account. That means that if you want to play under a different name, you can’t since it’s registered to that account name, even if you change your “persona” for your account on EA.
Creating a new account doesn’t seem to matter since the game is tied to the one you had signed into EA with first. This can come as a pretty rude surprise to PC players used to changing their names and creating colorful monikers to represent themselves online since it doesn’t tell you this until you try signing in as another name.
Failure to Open
You can feel the potential right out from when you jump out of the plane over enemy territory as flak explodes around you and Airborne captures plenty of excitement within the few hours that it lasts, but it squanders the chance with weak multiplayer and disappointingly short gameplay. Fans of the series might appreciate what it brings to the war room, but other players hitting the ground running may feel as if they had fought this war before.
Primotech Rating: 
Related Stories
Comments
2 Responses to “Medal of Honor: Airborne (PC)”
Leave a Reply
-
Top News
Latest Articles
Listen to Primocasts
Newest Previews
Recent Reviews
Fresh Media
-
Sponsor
Links
[...] Primo Technology - Medal of Honor Airborne (PC) [...]
Blowjob Swinger Sex
…
Blowjob Swinger Sex
…