While Infinity Ward breaks away from the WWII shooter genre with its modern day Call of Duty 4, Electronic Arts is out to prove that the genre still has some life left in it with their latest entry in their own WWII shooter series, Medal of Honor: Airborne. We got a quick demo of the game at E3 last week.

As the title implies, the new entry in the series will have you as a member of the 101st US Army's Airborne division. In our demo we were on board a plane that was about to make a parachute jump into enemy territory. The big difference for this game is that in theory you will be able to parachute in any portion of the map rather than stick to a linear maze as in most shooters. Where and when you jump is entirely up to you (Well, almost. If you are too scared to jump, the AI team will push you off the plane). Landing is a big part of this new title. You can actually land on top of Nazis and take them out but be careful; landing the wrong way can put you out of action for a few critical seconds.

The rest of the demo had our paratrooper character taking on the Nazi at a ruined European village. The radar shows specific objectives in the form of yellow triangles that had to be reached to accomplish your goals. Of course the enemy wasn't going to make this a cakewalk for us; their enemy AI was quite good at keeping us busy by taking cover and shooting around corners. One interesting thing in this new game is medals and awards for doing specific things like using the shotgun or machine gun effectively. Not only do you get bonuses you also get a slow motion effect a la Max Payne that makes you invulnerable for a few seconds; time enough to kill off a couple of extra pesky Nazis.

As you may know the game is using Epic's Unreal Engine 3 as its graphical basis rather than id Software's tech or EA's own graphics engine. The result, as one might expect, is solid visuals on the character models and weapons along with solid art textures for the levels. We are a little concerned that some developers may not use Unreal Engine 3 to its fullest effect for their games but that doesn't appear to be an issue for Medal of Honor Airborne.

The game is close to completion as we write this impressions article. It's due out for the PC and Xbox 360 in late August (the planned PS3 version is due out in November). Overall it looks like the the new features (open ended maps, console bonus) along with the typical WWII shooter establishments will make Medal of Honor: Airborne stand out from the crowd of similar shooters out there. We should learn soon if this will work for EA.

Blog + Share: Digg • Del.icio.us • Reddit • SU • furl • More: