More gameplay

Stealth

A few of the missions require you to, or turn out easier if you use stealth techniques to sneak past certain areas. Sometimes you’ll dress up as a Nazi officer in order to penetrate deep inside German installations. Drawing your weapon will blow your cover, as will running into another officer who will ask to see your papers. It’s possible to try and play through these levels with guns blazing, but that makes an already difficult game even more trying. Other times you’ll have to deal with searchlights mounted on guard towers with MG42s. If the searchlight spots you, you get torn up by the machine gun in a hurry. If you shoot out the spotlight, the soldier manning the MG42 somehow spots you immediately and turns you into hamburger. So it almost forces you to watch the pattern of the light, and dodge accordingly. We say almost, because there’s a way around this. If you use the sniper rifle to shoot the soldier manning the MG42 first, you can knock out the light with no real consequence.

He's airborne!

Das Boot

Hitler Youth

AI

In most cases, the AI in Medal of Honor is quite good. In missions where you have buddies, they are competent shots, and will use terrain, practice covering techniques, and advance intelligently for the most part. Enemy AI is pretty good as well, as they will also use cover, line up sideways on doorways to reduce their profile, lie prone while shooting, retreat when necessary, move to get better firing angles, and run out of the way of grenades. One time I even had a grenade that I tossed thrown back at me. However it’s not all good. The sensory ranges of the enemies don’t always make sense. Sometimes they will hear a nearby shot and go to investigate. At other times, you can snipe a guard standing 10 yards away from a machine gun nest, and the machine gunners don’t realize anything is amiss. Opening fire with a Thompson inside of a house should bring everyone in the building, or at least on the same floor, running to see what the fuss is, right? But more often than not, soldiers stay in their own neighboring rooms no matter what. Sometimes they’ll be hiding with weapons at the ready, waiting for you to enter, so it seems like they heard you. Other times not. I guess the German army is full of cowards?

A busy shipyard

No one can hear you die

Papers please!

Enemy aim, for the most part, is realistic. They don’t always hit you with the first shot, and if you stay in motion, it radically reduces their ability to hit you. You’ll still get plenty of abuse, so there are lots of health packs around to keep your hitpoints up. The exception to this rule are the snipers and some of the riflemen, who seem to have aim that is too good, and sensory ranges that rival that of a good hunting dog. The sniper town level was incredibly annoying, with dozens of possible windows and broken buildings to check as you advance. In a couple of the later levels, the game bogged down to saving dozens of times and reloading every minute or so b/c another unseen sniper would nail you repeatedly.

Adding to this problem is that the German sniper rifle, the Mauser Kar98, can be reloaded a lot more rapidly than the American Springfield 1903 sniper rifle. So once they start hitting you, you can’t even return fire effectively. Oh, and don’t forget, that they’ll sometimes shoot and move to another window or duck, meaning that a window you just checked could very well be harboring that one irritating sniper. How about walking instead of running, and hiding amongst cover or trees/brush? Forget about it – they seem to spot you every time, no matter what you do. Thankfully these annoying missions are the minority of the levels in MOHAA.