Medal of Honor

Medal of Honor is the series more or less responsible for the endless stream of war games set during the second World War that we've seen during the last decade. Finally it wore itself out and EA pulled it out of the spotlight for a couple of years in order to give it new life. Since then the genre has moved away from World War II and the new Medal of Honor has moved with it. This time we end up in the still raging war in Afghanistan, which is a bold move from EA.

It's hard not to compare this new Medal of Honor to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Not only because it's the current king of the hill, but because EA said straight out that Medal of Honor is going to topple of it from its throne. Time will show if that comes true, but it must be said that EA at least have made a good attempt.

In many ways, Medal of Honor is the opposite of Modern Warfare 2. There are no fights on the lawn in front of the White House, no frontal assault on drilling platforms, no megalomaniac James Bond-villains with a private army in his back pocket, no melodrama and no military jargon copied straight out of a Generation Kill-episode. We're never "Oscar Mike" in Medal of Honor.

All the stupidities that Modern Warfare 2 wallows in are completely absent from Medal of Honor. Instead we get Afghan mountain terrain, deserts and rural areas, the enemies are faceless Afghans, Arabs or Chechnyan and your colleagues speak relatively normal English.

If I would describe Medal of Honor with one word, it would be "sober". Yes, it's still a pastiche and a dramatization of war, but it's done with a feel that you hardly ever see in other war games, and it is obvious that the developers have respect for both the war in Afghanistan and the people who participate in it.

That doesn't mean that Medal of Honor is in any way boring. Afghanistan might consist mostly of brown mountains, but the developers have still managed to make the tour across the country exciting and varied. In some missions you only have to fight your way forward until you reach your goal, and fire at everything you meet on the way there, while others the formula is mixed up with some extra toys.

In on mission, for example, you have to drive an ATV from militia camp to camp, which all have to be infiltrated and neutralized in silence. Then you're placed at the weapon systems of an Apache-helicopter and level a Taliban-fortress to the ground, while later taking up the role as a sniper to keep your friends out of trouble while they are climbing up the side of a mountain.

You take on multiple roles during the course of the game - like performing missions with the special soldiers known as Tier One, or the regular troopers attached to the Rangers. And the game offers up fairly intense action, where you're usually under fire from many directions at once and need to find reasonable cover before you can fire back. All while trying not to be blinded by the sun, smoke clouds or other things in the environments, which doesn't lessens the challenge one bit.

At the same time the effect when you're shot one of the most convincing I've experienced in a long time. The combination of the shaking image and the sound effect is simply so disturbing that I instinctively pulls back or look for cover when I'm hit. On the normal difficulty level you can take being hit a couple of times and your health will automatically regenerate. It's still convincing enough that I never consider taking a couple of shots more before I can take out that enemy up in the window - I just don't want to get hit again. I can't remember the last time that happened in a game.

There's a lot of exciting and dramatic situations during the course of Medal of Honor, without the game falling back on flat platitudes and there were situations where I started to doubt if the cavalry would ever come to save me or I was actually meant to die. I will, of course, not tell you more about that here...

There's one thing that Medal of Honor - sadly - has in common with the competitor Modern Warfare 2, and that's the length. With the difficulty set to Normal I finished the game in one go, and the five hours it took me felt underwhelming. It's really entertaining while it's going on, but at the end you are left wanting more. Medal of Honor could have been longer. A lot longer. That might be the way things are these days, but it still rubs me the wrong way.

When you've finished the game you can throw yourself into the special Tier One-mode. Here you're challenged to finish the game's missions as fast as you can, with your times posted to the game's leaderboards. Headshots, killstreaks and similar moves stops the timer for a few seconds, so you'll need to know the game like the back of your hand. And it's hard. Really hard. Especially since the missions are quite long (the first one has a par-time of 25 minutes) and there are no checkpoints - if you die you'll just have to start over from the beginning.

Gamereactor was in the first of Medal of Honor's multiplayer-betas and back then we weren't very impressed with what we saw. But DICE, who are in charge of the multiplayer, have really tightened this part of the game and reached a point where it works really well. It's no longer an awkward mix between Modern Warfare and Bad Company 2, instead it walks the golden middle path between the two. The intensity and chaos have been turned up and large parts of the environments can be destroyed (even though buildings can't be fully demolished). There are no surprises to found, but it doesn't really matter that much - Medal of Honor's multiplayer feels tight, polished and most importantly entertaining.

Medal of Honor is the thinking man's Call of Duty. If you liked what you saw, but found Modern Warfare too stupid, this is the game for you. Gameplay-wise it's close to its main competitor, while the content is a whole class better and more thought through. It's a piece of entertainment, that despite being so short, will make an impression.