Today I am taking a break in the Holiday rush to do a review for the Nintendo Wii. This game has been out for quite some time and with so many other games it actually got pushed back on playing time. This game is Medal of Honor Heroes 2 for the Nintendo Wii. I have been hearing a ton of good things about this game, especially on the way the game controls with your Wii-mote.

So I finally plopped it into my Nintendo Wii and spent some quality time with it. After about a week of play I have very mixed feelings about it. So on to my review of Medal of Honor Heroes 2. This is kind of a hard game to follow when I have been playing Call of Duty 4 and Unreal Tournament III on my Playstation 3 all week. But I tried to give it a shot with a very open mind. Medal of Honor Heroes 2 is basically the same story as pretty much every other Medal of Honor game. You take on the Germans and try to succeed in victory. I am sure you get the picture.

Presentation:
Medal of Honor Heroes 2 features some new things this time around for the Nintendo Wii. The first thing is that the game takes full advantage of the Wii Zapper. Although this type of gameplay is fun in Arcade Mode, the Campaign and Online modes really do not feel right with this type on. The Wii Zapper works great with games like Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles and the Link game that came with it, but I honestly do not think this is the best way to play Medal of Honor Heroes 2. Stick with the Metroid-type controls and you will be fine.  The Campaign mode is the mode I had the most fun with. Controls are very responsive and you have a button that will allow you to auto-aim, which works like a charm in games like this. You will have to be holding your hand up for a long time though because once you drop your arm the screen goes crazy.

Online Play:
This is the mode that will have you throwing your Wii-more through your TV. Not by accident, but by pure anger of how lopsided this game is online. How in gods name did these guys get this so wrong? First off, there is no voice chat in Medal of Honor Heroes 2. I really am getting sick of hearing about Nintendo “looking into it”... Guys, you have 2 USB slots on the back of the Nintendo Wii. Just make a USB headset driver so you can plug a USB headset into the system. Problem solved. You can “message” people but that is like trying to pull tissue out of a Kleexen box with a pair of boxing gloves on. It is virtually worthless. 

The game does support 32 players online at once. It has the essential online play modes, which are Capture the Flag, Death Match and Team Death Match. But the biggest problem that lies in Medal of Honor Heroes 2’s online play is not the lack of chat. Hell, it’s not even the really bad graphics or the fact that they took off auto-aim. It is how hard the damn game can be. And I am not pulling anybodies leg here. This game is so frustrating that you might pop a vein in your neck in anger. Let me give you a typical Medal of Honor Heroes 2 online situation. You spot a enemy, you shoot him with clip after clip, the guy DOES NOT DIE. I shot a guy at point-blank range with every clip and he did not die. He turned around and with one bullet he killed me.

This is typical in this game. You end up having a lopsided score of something like 6 kills/25 deaths. And I am not the best at FPS. But in every FPS game I own I am always over 1.50% on my kill/death ratio. Why is this game so hard online? Some people have managed to do very good, but they are few and far between. And I know I am not alone in this. I read the forums on gamefaqs.com and other sites. Other have had these kind of problems as well. The crazy thing is, I get so mad that I keep going back to prove to myself that I really do not suck this bad. After a week of anger I am a bit better online, but not much. I managed to pull off 10 kills. WOW! To be fair, maybe it is the controls that I am just not used to. But this game is crazy online. Is if lag that makes a soldier take 50+ bullets and still live? Please tell me EA? If this is the case, please... give us a patch or something. Either way, Medal of Honor Heroes 2’s online modes will make you have your work cut out for you.

Graphics and Sound:
Here is another department in which Medal of Honor Heroes 2 shines as well as falls completely flat. The good things about the game is that it runs along at about 60 FPS. And it never seems to drop at anytime (except online if you get lag). There are also some rare moments where you will think the game looks actually good (inside the Church is one place). But other then that, Medal of Honor Heroes 2 looks like a typical Playstation 2 FPS game. It takes no effort in taking advantage of what the Nintendo Wii can actually do. It is basically a ramped-up port of a PSP game. Characters look plain and simple (they look horrendous online), the maps look dark and washed out. Colors are bland throughout the whole game.

Maybe the developer of “Battalion Wars II” had something when he said that Developers are getting lazy with developing on the Wii system. This game could have looked so much better. I hope that in 2008 game developers do more then just PS2/PSP ports onto the Nintendo Wii. I know it can’t do what the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 can do, but this system is supposed to be more powerful then 2 GameCube systems. The music and sounds of Medal of Honor Heroes 2 do sound very good. You have the old war music that is not a staple in old war games. There are also plenty of voices to go along with you in the ride.

The Bottom Line:
I was looking forward to this game because I am a very big FPS fan. But Medal of Honor Heroes 2 really let me down. I think COD4 and UTIII helped that as well. Normally I do not like to compare games on the Wii to games on the 360 and PS3, but this one was just too hard not to. The campaign and arcade modes are fun and the game moves as smooth as silk, but there really is nothing much to look at. And I will give it to the developers fo the controls, which are up there with Metroid 3. I wish they would have kept that same control scheme in online mode. Maybe it would have made the experience better. But the graphics just looks and feels like an average FPS on the Playstation 2 (only with motion control).

Medal of Honor Heroes 2 is a Catch 22 for your Nintendo Wii. It is fun and you will get some replay value out of it with online play (only because you will want to keep going back for more out of anger to prove that you are not this bad).