Next Level Gaming - Article: Medal of Honor Airborne Review

Medal of Honor: Airborne, the best in this long-running series to date...

Over the years I have become a huge fan of war FPS. I think it all started when I got a chance to review the Call of Duty for the PS2/Xbox. Since then I have grown to like the COD series as well as the Brothers in Arms series. For some reason though I never really grew fond of the Medal of Honor series. Don’t get me wrong, I liked the games, but I think after the first few MOH games they started to basically be the same game over and over with a new title tacked on. This all pretty much changed when I played the advanced demo for Medal of Honor: Airborne for the Xbox 360. Electronic Arts had the playing field of the Xbox 360’s system to take a tired game and rejuvenate it. And that is exactly what they did (thank God!)...

Medal of Honor Airborne Xbox 360 Features:

Online Play with up to 12 players.
Your ability to determine your own starting point dramatically changes the way each mission plays out.
View the entire operation from the air, and then control your parachute to choose your landing spot.
On the ground, gather your senses and assess the terrain.
A wide variety of authentic, customizable weapons are at your disposal, each with distinct characteristics.
Choose your path in this free roaming FPS environment.
The producers sought counsel from numerous expert sources to make certain the game ishistorically accurate and as true to the WWII Airborne experience as possible.
In-Game Dolby Digital
HDTV 720p/1080i/1080p

Presentation & Gameplay:

Medal of Honor: Airborne has you stepping into the boots of Boyd Travers, a Private First Class soldier of the 82nd Airborne Division. The game has you engage in battles throughout Europe. From rocky beginnings in Sicily to war-winning triumphs in Germany, each mission begins behind enemy lines, with an intense and fully interactive airdrop. The main game takes you on a long journey across enemy territory. Along the way you will engage in enemies, tanks and other things. The gimmick to this game is that every time you die you can parachute in. In a way this is a very cool aspect of Medal of Honor: Airborne because you can land anywhere you want. If you want to land on a rooftop or high atop some trees you can do so with ease. You can also land on a enemy and kill them (death from above). The parachute landing is very cool bonus that I am glad was added to the game. You also have a wide variety of weapons that were used in those days. From sniper rifles to rocket launchers. Each weapon can also be upgraded as well. I also like the fact that uyou can peep around corners and use this to your advantage. Very cool... especially for sniping. Medal of Honor: Airborne takes you from Italy to Germany, so there will be a ton of large locales during your journey. The game itself is pretty long and will take you a few days to finish from start to end. But like most FPS games I found that the real joy was in the online play. So I will be talking mostly about the Online aspect of Medal of Honor: Airborne...

Light um up!

Online (Multiplayer) Play:

Online gaming is where it’s at... I know some people may argue this. But when I log onto a online game, say.. Halo 3 (I have to get that Halo 3 plug in somewhere folks...) and it has close to 700,000 people playing online I would have to argue that online gaming IS the future of gaming. As for Medal of Honor: Airborne, online play is actually a mixed bag. The game does have more pros then it does cons. First I will start with the goods. Medal of Honor: Airborne is actually very fun to play online. Rooftop sniping has never been more fun in a game. You can have up to 12 players playing online at once (smaller them Call of Duty 3). You can play in ranked or unranked games. The only difference in ranked and unranked is when you play the ranked games they keep track of your kills and other points that you may earn while online. Unranked is basically just everything without the stat tracking. I also found that playing ranked will get you lit up. These are where the elite members play. And they will rip you a new one if you are just coming into this game for the first time. Make note to seriously practice up before hitting the ranked modes...

Now for the cons of online play. First off there are very few maps as well as very few online game types. I am hoping that down the road Electronic Arts will release some new maps on Xbox market Place. I don’t really care if they are free or if I have to fork over some Xbox points, I just want some new maps. There is death matches and capture the flag games, but beyond that there really is nothing else to offer. I also wish that unranked stats were saved. Because some people are just getting into the game and they really don’t want to go on a ranked match and get 5 kills and be killed 45 times. It is pretty much unfair to about 70% of the people who bought this game. It becomes extremely frustrating kicking ass and not having your scores saved. Another problem is the time in which you have to wait to find a server to play a game. My brother and I have played this game religiously for a few weeks, and we found that the wait could be anywhere from 45 seconds to 3 minutes.

I also found something that is a blessing as well as a curse in Medal of Honor: Airborne’s online play. If you shot someone or are shot by someone, the camera will pan all the over to where the person is. One Example... If you are lighting up someone with your sniper rifle. As soon as they die, their camera will pan over to where you are, pretty much giving away where your character is. And then they can seek you out and kill you when they re-spawn. The blessing is that if someone keeps sniping you, then you can find where they are and seek some revenge on them. The curse is if you’re the one sniping these people your hiding place is basically blown. So you have to pretty much snipe and then fine new hiding places to keep them from finding you. Lastly there are some major glitches while playing online. One of them is when you try to land, sometimes the game glitches and you are still in parachute mode. This results in you moving around the screen as if you are flying but your feet are still on the ground. You cannot see your weapon but when you fire it you still shoot. I have come across this glitch about a dozen times so far. Another glitch is that if someone gets a purple heart. It keeps repeating over and over. I got the purple heart about 30 times in one game. It just kept glitching “NLGSean has received the purple heart” over and over and over again.

The bottom line for Online Play is that it can be as fun as playing Call of Duty 3 online. I found that certain things rival COD3. One of them is being able to parachute in to wherever you want. I did find though that this can be a pain in the butt. Only America forces parachute in, while enemy forces re-spawn on the ground. This means that while you are parachuting in, the enemy can snipe you while your trying to land. This happens a lot in this game. So be careful and try to swerve and dodge those bullets while trying to land. It is a mixed bag online, but I found the pros definitely outdid the cons...

Lets go boys! Time to jump...

Graphics:

The graphics in Medal of Honor: Airborne have received a complete overhaul from the Xbox and Playstation 2 versions. I swear every time I played a Medal of Honor game on the Xbox, PS2 or GameCube I thought I was playing the same damn game I played 8 months ago... or 2 years ago. We had so many Medal of Honor games I don’t even remember a single one? It was just the same thing over and over again. And it really watered down what once was a great series. Thankfully you can throw out the window everything you once knew about a Medal of Honor game... Thanks to the Xbox 360’s graphic power, Electronic Arts has now added more detailed maps filled with nice lighting and effects such as mirror and water effects. For instance, while walking down a dark alley in a town you will see reflections on the windows, and wet pavement with nice reflections from the lights above. There are also nice blur effects as well as smoke and mist effects. As with many Xbox 360 games, when you walk out of a dark area you will see a brightness as your eyes adjust to the light outside. This is a effect I love to see in games (something that has been used a lot on 360 titles, especially the new Halo 3 game).

Maps range from small to medium-sized to nice and large. Some of the levels however look better then others. For instance some of the levels look great, with war-torn towns and dark eerie cloud-filled skies. Large detailed church’s tower over a town that once was... Some maps are filled with multiple places, such as graveyards, buildings and fields. These are really good on online mode. You can go somewhere in the distance and find a nice spot to use a sniper rifle or a granade cannon. Other maps seem to be somewhat bland and plain and could have used more time in the development room. I said it before and I will say it again before this review is over, I hope EA makes more maps for online mode. The few maps that you have to choose from are simply not enough. New multiplayer maps are really needed.

As far as the other graphics in the game. Character designs are pretty plain and basic as well. This is not a bad thing, but I have just seen better on the Xbox 360. Sometimes in single player mode I found that some of the enemies looked like my guys, and vise-versa. But let me get back to these character designs. I remember seeing video of character expressions (supposedly in realtime) in a earlier build of this game and thinking it was pretty cool to see all of the facial animations. But I really do not see it in the finished product. What happened guys? Did I miss something? The models look good, but I dont see the extreme expressions I saw in those earlier builds. Either way though, the game still looks pretty damn good even after my gripes. Play Medal of Honor: Airborne in HD is also a real treat (thanks to the new 360 HDMI port).

Music and Sound:

As with pretty much all war FPS, the music can be amazing. Medal of Honor: Airborne boost some really good music. It gives you the feel of being stuck in Sicily or war-torn France, fighting against Germany Nazi’s. The games sounds are also very authentic, from the sounds of the guns and the sounds of the bombs dropping from a distance. Some levels have their own ambient sounds such as sirens going off in the distance, or a old song playing on a record player in a burned out building. Medal of Honor: Airborne keeps the tradition going with great music and sound. I will also say that the games voice acting is also very good. You will hear babble from other soldiers in your unit as well as the accents and screaming of German soldiers as they try to kill you. Overall, a solid performance in terms of Medal of Honor: Airborne’s music and sounds...

hhmmm.. where should I land?

The Bottom Line:

I played the Medal of Honor: Airborne Demo and I was happy to fork out $60 for this game. I am a sucker for war FPS, and this is another great addition to my Xbox 360 library. Medal of Honor: Airborne helped me and my brother in Maryland feed our Xbox Live needs until halo 3 came out. And I will also add that from time to time we still go back and kick some butt online. I am hoping though that electronic Arts puts out some new maps and pumps Medal of Honor: Airborne full of more online life.

Overall, Medal of Honor: Airborne is a great worthy buy for the Xbox 360.

[Review by Sean A. Foster]