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Medal of Honor: Airborne

User Rating:

ESRB: Blood,Language - Mild,Violence
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Genre(s): Shooting
Home Page: http://www.ea.com/moh/airborne/ind...

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By: Antti Summala Sep 17, 2007

Multiplayer

The multiplayer game is the standard affair, with capture the flag and team deathmatch (called teammatch) game types. Capture the flag is modeled after Battlefield 2 and Day of Defeat, and airborne teammatch is the only game type with a twitch: players on the Allied side spawn in midair and make a paradrop onto the playing field. You can't botch your landing in multiplayer, so the only difference between sides is the spawning time, manner and location. There are only six multiplayer maps, and a lack of dedicated server software is a major problem for MoH:A's prospects as a popular multiplayer game. Currently there are only a few dozen player-hosted servers, and the number of players is regularly less than two hundred. EA has announced a wish to make the game easily moddable, but until they get a lot more players in, it'll be hard if not impossible to get modders interested in the game.

American soldiers are not only heroes in Medal of Honor: Airborne, they're also victims of the Nazis' cruelty

The depiction of German soldiers is still completely inhuman. It'll be a while before a WWII shooter lets you play a German, Italian or Japanese protagonist in anywhere except multiplayer

Conclusion

The first three hours Medal of Honor: Airborne is a beautifully realized single player experience. The rest of it is marred by the inconsistency of its storytelling. Based on trailers, the demo version, marketing material and interviews, the preconception I got was of a game serious about war and the implications of war. Historical, realistically depicted heroism, camaraderie, tragedy and death just don't mix with comic book style super villains. We were told, "The 82nd Airborne suffered the heaviest losses of any division," but to whom? The Nazi Storm Elite super soldiers? This shows a lack of class that seems to be cropping up lately in games marketing. When the credits rolled, I was left in a bewildered state: what on Earth just happened?

Summary of YouGamers Hardware Testing

The publisher of this game state the following specifications for their minimum and recommended requirements:

Component	Publisher's Minimum	Publisher's Recommended
Processor	Pentium 4 2.8 GHz or AMD equivalent	Not specified
Memory	1 GB (Windows XP) / 1GB (Windows Vista)
Graphics Card	128MB DirectX 9-compatible
Graphics Card Example	128 MB ATI Radeon X1300 PRO / NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT
Free Disk Space	2 GB
Net Link	Not specified

To learn more about how YouGamers performs its hardware testing, click here. Through our extensive gameplay and hardware testing across the full spectrum of PC configurations, YouGamers suggests that one should use the following guidelines for an appropriate minimum and recommended setup:

Component	YouGamers Minimum	YouGamers Recommended
Processor	AMD Athlon 64 2800+ / Intel Pentium 4 620	AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ / Intel Core 2 Duo E6300
Memory	1024 MB	1024 MB
Graphics Card	ATI Radeon X1650 256MB / NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GS 256MB	ATI Radeon x1900 256MB / NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT 256MB
Free Disk Space	2 GB	2 GB
Net Link	Broadband	Broadband

Scores

To learn more about our scoring methodology, please click here.

Gameplay	82	Well thought out controls, innovative and intuitive parachute jumping, and good level design make MoH:A an enjoyable but not a groundbreaking shooter.
Graphics	88	Good graphics design - the research put into developing the different soldier and weapon models shows. Dramatic night missions contrast with daylit levels that show the devastation of war.
Audio	77	Orchestral scores are becoming standard fare, and MoH:A's background music doesn't stand out. Sound effects are punchy, but the disembodied voices that guide the player are a bit disconcerting.
Technology	72	Unreal Engine 3 gives unsurprising results, but the game's bad scalability to low-end configurations and poor performance on the publisher's minimum specification cost it in the tech category.

OVERALL

Medal of Honor: Airborne shows how important it is to follow the same ideology throughout the design of a game. Mixing genres like the game does isn't going to win a lot of fans. The nightmare/horror sequence in the last mission fits the rest of the game's tone like a sock on a rooster.

If you wish to comment on this review or discuss the game further, then head over to our forum - click right here (registration not required).

Patches and updates:

EA has promised a patch for Medal of Honor: Airborne. The patch will fix several multiplayer bugs and tweak balancing, add a dedicated server application and fix a couple of bugs in the single player campaign. The patch was supposed to be out on the week after release, but it slipped and is "coming soon".