Allow me to introduce...

[jumpy]

...my most disappointing game of 2007.


Medal of Honor Airborne (PC)


I really loved Medal of Honor Spearhead; it was a fantastic game (still is for the most part).
As a result of which I had extremely high hopes for this game.
It does look, sound and 'feel' wonderful. The levels are nicely set out and contain a massive amount of detail and intricacy. Coupled with the subtle backdrops, the whole game visually and aurally comes together as a finer piece of WWII shoot 'em ups' as one could wish for.

However, that is not the full story by any means.

First we must consider the single player campaign. On the whole I liked it and found respawning back into the level from your last checkpoint after being killed and then being able to choose where I landed, to be very favourable indeed.
This non linear approach to the level design took away much of the annoyance of previous releases, where one might become stuck at some crucial point and not have enough ammo/time/health to complete the mission, forcing you to start the whole level from scratch.
-In a way game designers are giving us more fun and less frustration; letting you just get on and play the game without so much restriction.

Whilst I appreciated the steadily increased badness of the AI throughout following levels, I did find the uber soldier dudes, with the body armour, gas mask and mg34 blazing away at me, to be really, well, stupid. They need to go back to Return to Castle Wolfenstine, where they belong; meet up with some buddies, sink a few beers, then try and pull one of those Elliteguard hotties in the leather catsuits - you know the ones I mean

The weapons. :hmm: where to start? Initially the level up thing with the weapon mods was fun and all beautifully rendered of course, but it quickly became annoying in certain cases. For example, one minute your g43 rifle becomes useless to shoot because all of a sudden in now has a scope on it and you're fighting indoors... All seemes a bit gimicky, almost like....
But I digress. The weapons as standard from the period would have more than sufficed, without all of this 'upgrade nonsense'.

The controls!

Having got used to the way MOH Spearhead works, through many years of online gaming, I thought all the essentials were there for the game to work. Why change it?
Take a simplistic, functional setup and then completely break it to smithereens.
I will say that the duck/lean stance thing when using iron sights does work once you get used to it. But every silver lining has its inevitable rainy cloud in tow, in the form of there being no sight toggle. You wanna lookie see? You hava to keep yaw finger ona button!
Not forgetting the dismal walk and lean thing - if you've ever played Spearhead online you'll know exactly what I mean when compared to this.
I'm still trying to put my finger on what is wrong with this game... it feels like.. it'll come to me in a bit no doubt..

And now for my biggest complaint for this title -

Multiplayer.
Or more accurately, the complete and utter lack of it.
Since I've owned this game (from its release date) I have been able to play online for about 3 hours in total. The rest of the time I am cruelly defeated by the taunting prompts from the monitor: Joining game... You have joined the game... Connection lost... You have been disconnected. - que theme music and splash screen.

This is no noob failure to get his router configured right, nor any other user error.
Plain and simple, MULTIPLAYER DOES NOT WORK PROPERLY!

As of this evening at 23:30 gmt, it still doesn't work properly.

What little I have seen of the mulitplayer element is not encouraging, with so many clipping errors in the maps I played it was unreal. Plus the missing objective mode and just about all of the good stuff that made the online MOH Spearhead community so big in the first place.



Conclusions.
On the whole I liked the games single player element. I can forgive some of the controls blunders, partly because I (was) a fan of the series, but mostly because it looks nice and was pretty well thought out level wise.
But at the crunch this game has failed in the most crucial area for me and for its continued survival and for the the proud tradition of gaming started off by Medal of Honor Allied Assault: MULTIPLAYER.

When I put it all together I finally realised what has been bugging me in italics throughout this little meandering.
Medal Of Honor Airborne is a console game at heart. Look at the clues:
- Some very odd characters
- Controls clearly inspired by a Playstation analogue joy pad.
- Involving single player content with no real online capability.

Sadly I can but hope that an up and coming patch will make amends. After all the original MOH game only had multiplayer added as an afterthought and quite some time after the game had been released, if memory serves me correctly.

It could have given so much more, and though I'm a sucker for WWII FPS games of the Medal of Honor variety, I cannot give this game any more than it deserves:

A very weak 3.5 out of 10 from me.