Game Overview

Developer: EALA (aka Dreamworks)
Publisher: EA
Estimated Release: November 2002

Big act to follow

At Thursday’s Camp EA event, we had our first look at the upcoming expansion pack to 2015/Electronic Arts’ wildly successful shooter, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. Based on the Quake 3 engine, MOHAA was the franchise’s first foray into the PC platform after a couple of very successful iterations on the Playstation platform. Featuring a story driven gameplay, and a design that caters largely to realism in locales and weapon behavior, MOHAA became an instant hit amongst PC shooter fans. Its extensive single player campaign featured excellent mission design for the most part (the first few sniper levels were an exception), and the most enjoyable single player experience for a shooter since No One Lives Forever. EALA will attempt to pick up from where 2015 left off with the as of yet unnamed expansion pack to MOHAA.

Deadly faceoff

We're not dressed for winter!

The nitty gritty

The pack will of course feature nine new single player levels spread across three different settings. One will take you back to D-Day. While in MOHAA you joined the beach landing at Omaha beach, this time you will be part of the botched US Airborne parachute drop behind the beach the night before D-Day. You’ll attempt to weaken German coastal defenses to soften the landing for the amphibious troops. Another set of levels takes you to the snow covered Ardennes forest during the Battle of the Bulge, as the German army makes its desperate counter-attack against surging allied forces from the west. On the final set of missions, you’ll ride shotgun alongside the Soviet forces as they invade Berlin from the east. A drive in a T-34 tank may be featured in these missions.

While MOHAA traced the steps of a Lt. Mike Powell, in the expansion pack the player takes the role of Sgt. Jack Barnes. We’re pretty sure that Powell will make a cameo or at least get referred to in the expansion pack.

Since you’ll be fighting alongside the British and the Russians, you’ll get access to their weapons (the original MOHAA gave you arsenals from the US and German sides), including the British Enfield Mark I sniper rifle, the cheap but effective Sten submachine gun, and the Soviet PPSh-41 submachine gun. Ten to twelve new multiplayer levels created by EA will ship with the pack, along with about five to ten popular user-created maps.

Bazooka moon

Coffee time

Multiplayer hands-on

None of the new weapons were available for testing at the event, so I had to resort to my trusty Sturmgewehr instead of being able to try out a new gun. We did run around a couple of the new maps, including one based off of a submarine base with multiple levels to run across, and another that reminded me a lot of DE-Train from Counter-Strike (only much more extensive). One important change that we noticed in multiplayer deathmatch is that the dropped health packs from dead no longer restore 50 health instantly. You have to wait a few seconds for your health meter to climb up instead of being instantly refreshed. This new detail makes it less easy to go on massive killing sprees in DM like you could when MOHAA was first released (especially with the one shot kill shotguns).

New multiplayer modes will be introduced as well – details were sketchy, but we were informed that servers will now be able to limit the use of certain weapons (server operators can easily get rid of grenade spamming in team games or shotgun wielding demons in deathmatches). There’s also a full-featured software development kit planned, but this SDK may be available for free download if it’s not finished in time for release with the pack.

Duc

We enjoyed the original MOHAA single player campaign so much that we’re looking forward to more adventures on the frontlines with the expansion pack when it’s released in November.