Playing Medal of Honor, the new military combat game from Electronic Arts, I couldn’t stop thinking two things. First, EA is supposed to be better than this. And second, Activision and Call of Duty don’t have much to worry about.
Way back in the misty, distant infancy of mass electronic gaming — otherwise known as the 1980s — the Electronic Arts brand stood for the highest levels of quality and innovation in interactive entertainment. EA’s archrival, Activision, was the one playing catch-up, churning out somewhat thin, schlocky diversions.
Things change. Over the years, even as Electronic Arts raked in the cash from Madden football and the rest of its sports empire, the company seemed to lose its way as a creative enterprise. It appeared that EA began trying to reduce game making to a business school process rather than treating it as, well, an electronic art.
Activision, meanwhile, gradually raised its standards of creativity and technical production, culminating in the smash success of its Call of Duty franchise. With its transition from World War II to modern times, Call of Duty has become the benchmark in first-person shooters, among the most popular genres of video games.
Electronic Arts has been trying admirably to recapture its elan. It has achieved successes, like the new science-fiction horror franchise Dead Space. But perhaps nothing could be more important to the company — and to gamers’ perception of the company — than to create a formidable rival to Call of Duty in the modern shooter segment.
So that was Medal of Honor’s job: Give Call of Duty a run for its money and maybe even dethrone it as the world’s top shooter franchise.
At that, Medal of Honor has failed. It is not a bad game. Several years ago it might have defined the state of the art. But now, in a market with Call of Duty on one side and EA’s own Battlefield series on the other, Medal of Honor comes across as mediocre. It certainly does shine at moments, although nowhere nearly often or consistently enough to satisfy the expectations it bears. Much of the time, Medal of Honor comes across as derivative and uninspired; in terms of basic game structures there is essentially nothing here that players have not already seen elsewhere.
It is even shockingly sloppy in places. This is not what the new, improved Electronic Arts is supposed to be about, and that is why Medal of Honor is the most disappointing game I have played this year.
Like Call of Duty, the Medal of Honor series was originally set during World War II. And like its rival, Medal of Honor has now leaped forward to the battlegrounds of today. But while Call of Duty revolves around fictional, even fanciful, terrorist organizations and plots, Medal of Honor is set squarely on the battlefields of Afghanistan, with the player cast for most of the game as an American special forces operative and as an everyday US soldier in a few scenes.
The problem is that few of the levels feel like real battlefields. Instead they feel like scripted shooting galleries pitting you against opponents who seem to have learned everything they know about tactics from Whack-A-Mole. Even when the environments appear expansive, they are actually quite linear.
For example, early in the game you must capture a gate controlled by enemy troops on the far side of a ditch. A great game would give you the objective, then allow you to achieve it your own way, using the techniques you prefer. I saw a door into a building leading to the gate, but it would not open. After wandering around for a few minutes, I realized that the game was forcing me to go to a sniping position on an outcropping above. Only after sniping at a few bad guys could I return to my original position and open the door. Instead of giving me the option of busting in guns blazing, or approaching stealthily, the game was forcing me to play its way.
Moments like this abound, which would be less objectionable if the game’s scripting weren’t bugged in many places. After clearing a town of enemy gunmen, I found myself at a dead end before yet another door that would not open. Once I backtracked, I realized that one of my computer-controlled squad mates (supposedly one of the world’s toughest warriors) was stuck on a small bush that was preventing him from reaching the checkpoint. I had to start the level over.
And then there is the bug in an early mission in which you are supposed to direct salvos of Hellfire missiles against approaching armored vehicles. The problem is that on the Windows version (I also played the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions a bit), a nasty software bug often prevents you from actually firing the missiles — another level I had to restart.
Then there was the time I got stuck behind a crate in an encampment and couldn’t get out, no matter what I did. The solution: Restart again.
These are all signs of unforgivably slipshod testing, and they give Medal of Honor a rushed-out-the-door quality. On the Xbox 360, animations routinely slowed to a crawl once the action on the screen reached a certain density, revealing that inadequate programming resources were devoted to the game.
That is not to say all is bad here. At its best, “Medal of Honor delivers an extremely intense, visceral combat experience, as when you and your buddies are pinned down in a ruined hut with Taliban fighters closing in from the high ground. Gradually, enemy rocket-propelled grenades destroy the building until you are flat on your face, trying to take cover behind mounds of rubble. When the helicopter gunships finally arrive to save your bacon, the feelings of relief and gratitude are almost overwhelming.
But Medal of Honor does not deliver those moments in its single-player campaign with the polish and frequency most gamers have come to expect. And sadly, the multiplayer component does not fare better.
Most of the prerelease publicity around “Medal of Honor focused on the game’s original plan to allow people to play online as either American forces or the Taliban. After protests from politicians, EA recanted and simply renamed the force opposing the Americans the ... Opposing Force, or Opfor. Players on the Opfor still appear to be from the Middle East or Central Asia, and their job is still to defeat the human players controlling the American avatars, but they’re not called the Taliban anymore.
The upshot, of course, is that many actual gamers don’t care what the two sides in a multiplayer match are called. As far as they are concerned, the sides could be called Red and Blue or Vanilla and Chocolate. Still, a name change does not obscure that Medal of Honor’s multiplayer possesses neither the open, frenetic quality of Call of Duty’s online modes nor the wide-ranging, more strategic feel of Battlefield: Bad Company 2.
Medal of Honor represents a missed opportunity. This is not quite the Bad Old EA, but if Electronic Arts wants to take back the mantle of leadership it seems to have conceded to Activision, it will have to do better than this.
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