The Medal of Honor series has been around for almost 10 years now, and spawned the first 3D game to take place during World War 2. From that point on, almost a dozen titles have been made, and the cookie is finally starting to spoil. Now, the Medal of Honor series makes its debut on nextgen consoles, boasting nonlinear game play where you can go anywhere and do anything. Is this the case? Not exactly. In Medal of Honor Airborne, you step into the shoes of Boyd Travers; a PFC in the 82nd Airborne Division. You might be very eager to kill some krout at this point, but first you must train in the ways of the eagle. The game quickly throws you into action, putting you on a plane and telling you to jump. When you jump, you will be guided by prompts on the lower end of your screen, telling you what to do to land successfully on the point marked by a green flare. If you don’t strafe your landing before you hit the ground, you will land too hard and have to wait a couple of seconds before you get up. If you do strafe your landing, you will land on your feet. If you strafe at a certain angle, you will land with a running start, which is what you want, but pretty hard to pull off. Once you land, you will do it once again, but with a smaller landing point. Finally, you will be tasked to land on an elevated platform, and when you do this, you will finally be done with your training and whisked off to battle. But wait; what happened to weapons training, or hell, mechanics training? You’re not going to get that in Medal of Honor Airborne. Since some of the controls have been altered quite a bit for the new mechanics, you’re going to have to either read the manual or play around with the controls until you get things right.
After the 15 second load time, you will find your self on a heavily damaged plane with a dead commander, and a whole bunch of confusion. You will then be ordered to jump, and if you don’t jump, you will be pushed. Now it is your job to get into the fight. In the earlier levels, there won’t be much danger in the air, so you are free to survey your landing zone. In the later levels, you’ll have move strategically, as there are snipers that can take you out in the sky. Even though the game boasts that you can land anywhere on the battlefield, this isn’t entirely true. In truth, you can land anywhere in a predetermined area. Everything else is blocked off by invisible walls, gently guiding you back into your predetermined battlefield. You have the ability, in this predetermined area, to land either into the heat of the battle, to the flank, at a safe zone, which is marked by a green flare and provides ammo and health, or stealthily behind enemy lines. What makes this feature very cool is the fact that you can basically plan out your strategy in the air, and then execute it. You want to land through a window and flank a sniper? Go ahead. You want to land on top of a roof, beside an enemy stronghold? Be my guest. Though it is not all that was promised, it sure is cool.
Don’t look down!
Now once you land, what are you going to do? Complete the predetermined objective of course. No matter where you land, there will be objectives for you to complete in predetermined places and at predetermined times. It seems pretty straight forward, but this does take some of the freedom away from your hands. Plus, many objectives will require you to take one specific route, further limiting your freedom and making the game feel like more of a corridor shooter; even though it boats in trailers that it strays away from this archaic mechanic. Now, if you are not a Medal of Honor pro, I suggest you play the game on a lower difficulty, because your enemies are absolutely superhuman. They know where you are regardless of where you land. I have had points where I landed in a tower, across the map with a sniper rifle, and looked through a crack in the wall, only for a couple of Nazis on the opposite side of the map to spot me and start to fire. And when they fire, they will hit their mark. If any part of your body is exposed, they will hit it. World War 2 weaponry is not nearly as accurate as modern day weaponry, but this game sure does make it seem so. These enemies are dead-shots, hitting you with extreme precision from unbelievable distances away. Combined with the fact that they will spot you as soon as you take a shot, or just look at them, from insane distances, this takes a huge amount of fun and realism from the game. What makes it worse is the fact that enemies can take a huge amount of punishment before they die is very unrealistic. I’ve had instances where I’ve emptied an entire round magazine (50 rounds) into a Nazi before he went down. Plus, there is no indication that you are indeed hitting them, because they do not falter back, or show any pain whatsoever. They stay in the same animation when they are being hit by hot steal, as if they weren’t. This is very inconsistent, as you life bar will drop significantly fast when under fire. The lack of animation also translates into their comical body movement, as they only know how to run, crouch, and shoot, so they turn around way too fast. It’s insane, but you can only see it to believe it. Enemies also have a tendency to through an unbelievable amount of grenades, which is very annoying. You will die from them a whole lot, so you’d better watch out. At least you can kick them away if they are in your radius (the grenade indicator is a lot more visible than in Call of Duty 4), but hopefully they won’t bounce off your ally and land directly at your feet (explained later in this review).
