Medal of Honor: Airborne
User Rating:
  Log in to rate this game!
ESRB:
Blood,Language - Mild,Violence
Publisher: Electronic Arts Genre(s): Shooting Home Page: http://www.ea.com/moh/airborne/ind...
Single player campaign: if you don't jump, you will be pushed
Your first combat drop towards the Sicilian town of Adanti
Throughout the single player campaign you assume the identity of Boyd Travers, Private First Class in the US Army's 82nd Airborne Infantry Division. The campaign starts with a training mission that has you jump out of a C-47 cargo airplane, with the instructor giving helpful tips and pep talk: "Jumping out of an airplane is one of the safest things a man can do." Although pulling yourself out through the door - or getting pushed if you hesitate - gets your adrenaline running nicely, don't worry: you can't hurt yourself in the game's parachute jumps, regardless of how you land, or what difficulty level you're playing at. You can play the campaign at Casual, Normal or Expert difficulty, but you'll find out what's different between them only when the enemy starts shooting at you. You don't have to wait too long for that to happen: right after the training mission, you'll be headed for Sicily and the 82nd's first combat jump.
Operation Husky is based on the historical airborne assault on occupied Sicily in July 1943, and sets the tone the first two thirds of the game. You get paradropped in the middle of a strategic location currently in enemy control, and have to complete objectives like destroying anti-aircraft guns, fuel and munitions stockpiles, disabling communications equipment and of course taking control of the area. Along the way you'll meet and shoot dozens of Italian and German soldiers, and even go toe to toe with Tiger tanks. For special jobs like the Tigers, there's always the right tool somewhere close by. The level designers have done their best to avoid frustrating the player - you can finish every level no matter what weapons you chose to start it with.
After taking part in a successful yet costly invasion of Sicily, the next mission is Operation Avalanche, which puts you in the spearhead of the Allied attack on mainland Italy. The enemy troops get tougher, a continuing trend through the rest of the game's missions, but so do you: weapons you pick up from fallen enemies or comrades are unlocked as permanent additions to your arsenal. More importantly, you'll get weapons expertise badges from skillful shooting - in particular headshots, melee kills and three or five consecutive kills - which give upgrades to your weapons. These upgrades are quite useful, providing, for example, higher ammo capacity, less recoil, faster reload speed or more damage. Each weapon can be upgraded three times. The upgrades aren't selectable, but they're always beneficial. Upgraded weapons are much more effective, to the extent that with fully upgraded kit, you'll waltz through levels that were previously tough to crack. Your weapon unlocks, expertise badges and upgrades carry through to replays at higher difficulty levels, which makes them a lot easier. The different difficulty levels seem to have a major effect on just one thing, enemy fire. You get hit a lot more often and lose a lot more health on Expert difficulty compared to Casual, which means that your heroic charge that wiped out a machine gun nest at Casual or even Normal level will very quickly put you face down on Expert - but as a slight compensation, you'll often get to enjoy the scenery once again while dropping from the sky. This has a major impact on the way you can successfully play the game at different difficulty levels: on Casual you can quickly romp through levels, scoring kills in quick succession with your Tommy gun, while the tougher difficulty levels force you to sneak and snipe from the distance, especially towards the end of the game.
Better AI is one of the features that EA Los Angeles was most excited about before the launch of Airborne, and in fact enemies and friendlies alike move and act a little more realistically than in previous Medal of Honor games. I couldn't really see the enemies get much more cunning or aggressive at increased difficulty levels: enemies that are behind cover still peek out at standard intervals, putting their heads in my sights. Enemies tend to move in completely predictable patterns until attacked. When fired at, they try to evade, and sometimes fall back to a better position. If you're not careful, they also man machine guns that you previously cleared, just to make your life miserable. They don't do particularly nasty stuff like send your grenades back in return mail, even though you have the option of kicking away enemy grenades that land at your feet. If you play carefully and use cover, only the really aggressive enemies in the game's final mission pose a threat to your health and safety.
Related Stuff Games: Medal of Honor: Airborne
Tags |
 
 
 
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
