Gameplay

Varied Missions

As mentioned earlier, Medal of Honor’s single player campaign is broken up into six missions – actually six different settings, each subdivided into several levels One complaint we have, is that each mission seems fairly standalone; there’s no real sense of continuity from one to the next aside from the historical chronology. But in light of what the game has to offer, the discontinuity is merely a minor complaint.

The variation you get in the missions you play is extraordinary. A lot of games will wow the player with impressive levels early on, then degenerate into filler levels later where they merely throw lots of enemies at you to shoot. In MOHAA, the developers clearly put a lot of thought into level design by incorporating different twists on the standard “get from point a to point b and kill as many men as you can along the way.” And the surprises continue from start to finish.

Stop chasing me

Get back in that house

More boom boom

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It’s not just endless killing

It’s not so much that MOHAA is innovative. Certainly a lot of the gameplay ideas they use are borrowed from other games or movies. This isn’t the first time you get to ride on the back of a jeep as the machine gunner and shoot enemies while the computer drives for you. But you’re immersed in the game b/c you not only have to shoot men on the ground, but troop carrying trucks chasing you and Stukas strafing you from the air. It’s almost like an Indiana Jones film. In the middle of another level in a bombed out French town, a German Tiger tank appears (just like in Saving Private Ryan, and you have to hit it several times with a slow reloading bazooka to kill it. All the while, the escorting German troops are peppering the windows with covering fire, and the Tiger is literally blowing holes in the house that you’re standing in, collapsing it around you. It’s not often a game gives me an adrenaline rush. Simply awesome.

There’s another level that was probably inspired by No One Lives Forever’s first sniper level…but again, done better. You run up into a high building with your sniper rifle to protect a stolen King Tiger tank (other levels let you actually drive that King Tiger tank, btw) parked on a bridge. The Germans have the bridge wired for detonation, and you have to snipe German soldiers as they run two and three at a time to the plunger on the other side of the bridge. In the meantime, you also have to switch to your binoculars and call in airstrikes on enemy tanks approaching from the other side of the river, AND deal with stormtroopers running up the stairs to shoot you in the back. Dealing with the triple threat was the most invigorating and stressful point of the game. And I loved every second of it. These are just a few of the many examples of thoughtful level design that permeate MOHAA’s single player campaign from start to finish.

Nice plane

Come strong or don't come at all

Wrecking expensive aircraft

Scripted sequences

I’ll come out and admit it – I’m a sucker for scripted sequences, and MOHAA delivers plenty of them. The opening mission is chock full of them; before the game even starts, half your platoon is blown up when a Panzerschreck blows up the truck carrying half your men. That’s when you have to hop out of your truck with the remaining men and do the mission at half-strength. Another example of this was the house to house fighting in the hedgerows where you rescue some Airborne men trapped in a house. After you clear the house of Germans and unbarricade the trapped men in an upstairs room, you witness a conversation between your partner and one of the Airborne – it’s abruptly cut off when a German sniper nails the poor Airborne guy in the head, triggering an invasion of spawning German troops from the backyard (whom you fight by shooting out from various windows of the house) and then the frontyard.