Gameplay: Jump where you want, but stick to the script people!

You are briefed of the game's missions in this authentic-looking tent. Your only objective: "Pay attention!"

For all the talk of redesigned AI, Medal of Honor: Airborne is still completely scripted. Although the scripting must be much more complex to account for all the different routes the player can take through a mission, MoH:A still sits firmly on its roots. There are some hiccups in the scripting as well: you get scripted instructions and encouragement from fellow soldiers even if there's nobody around. This can make things confusing, especially if you hear an Allied soldier tell you something while running into a German trooper in a dark corridor. If you fail to double-check, you'll probably just run past him and get clobbered with a rifle butt. It's also pretty amazing how your fellow airborne, fighting hundreds of meters away in trenches, immediately know that if was you who sniped a German soldier from your distant perch.

Following other Allied soldiers is often the best way to clear checkpoints: if you see them stopping, you know there's something you specifically need to do - most often kill certain enemy soldiers, or advance beyond a certain point. After doing that, the Paras will move ahead to the next cover, and wait for you to accomplish your next task. If there aren't any friendlies around and nobody's telling you (with that strange, disembodied Bronxian voice) what to do next, you're probably in the wrong place.

Hitting a checkpoint after completing an objective means that if you die or load the game, you'll be dropping from the sky to go for the next one. Parachuting towards the playing area several times familiarizes you with the map quicker than in pretty much any other FPS game. You'll find "skill drops" on the ground, marked with a discarded parachute and usually located somewhere on top of or inside buildings and structures. If you complete all five skill drops in a mission, you'll get awarded with parachute wings - these are only for the bragging rights. Some skill drops are in particularly advantageous sniping positions, and one leads you to a secret area that makes an otherwise hair-pulling grade area a walk in the park.

Some of the skill drops are even harder than this one

You don't have or need a map during the missions, although there is a small radar that shows the location of nearby allied soldiers, enemies and objectives. Objectives that are further away are shown as compass arrows on the radar, so you'll never be lost wondering what to do next. A map of the play area is shown before each mission in a briefing, with safe green drop zones separated from enemy-controlled red zones. Although the manual calls the playing area "expansive" and "free-roaming", the maps are actually rather small: after clearing out the opposition, it only takes a minute or two run from one end of the map to the other.

Many missions have checkpoints that don't allow you to parachute in: instead, you'll start on the ground at the checkpoint location. You can easily get stuck in the familiar rut of having to run through the same gauntlet over and over again, especially in the later missions on tougher difficulty levels. Anyone who's played a Medal of Honor or Call of Duty game previously should know exactly what I'm talking about - hearing the same opening chords of the grand orchestral score and the same scripted dialogue, running through the same alleys and getting chewed up by the same MG42 nests, respawning, hearing the same opening chords again, and so on. I guess some things never change.