Medal of Honor: Allied Assault Review January 30, 2002 Bob Colayco

Introduction

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Developer: 2015
Publisher: EA
Officlal site: http://mohaa.ea.com

Ever notice how movies with similar plots and themes seem to all come out at the same time? In 1997, we endured two volcano movies: Volcano and Dante’s Peak. Then we had a pair of comet-colliding-with-earth movies in 1998: Armageddon and Deep Impact. That same year saw the release of two World War II movies - Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line.

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Who’s responsible for all of this?

Grey Matter Studios (founded by many of the former members of Xatrix, makers of Kingpin) collaborated with Activision to release RTCW last year. Electronic Arts utilized helpful licenses from its association with Dreamworks SKG (producers of Saving Private Ryan) and contracted 2015 to develop Medal of Honor Allied Assault. Interestingly, 2015 had no prior experience making a full game – they’re best known for their work on Wages of Sin, the expansion pack to the ill-fated SiN. Now who remembers all the comparisons being made between SiN and Half-Life before they were released?

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Medal of Honor franchise

The Medal of Honor series made its first appearance on the Playstation 1 in late 1999, and became arguably that platform’s best first person shooter. You played as Lt. Jimmy Patterson, running covert missions deep into German occupied territory, shooting up Nazis with 12 authentic WWII weapons. The original Medal of Honor was so popular among critics and the buying public that it spawned a sequel (prequel) on Playstation 1, Medal of Honor Underground, where you took a lead role in the French resistance. MOHU was released in late 2000, but wasn’t quite the runaway hit that the original was.

Allied Assault is the franchise’s first appearance on the PC. It’s not a rehash of either of the two Playstation games – these are all new missions. You even play as a different hero, Lt. Mike Powell. References to Patterson, and Manon from MOHU are made, and you even get to meet up with Manon, but that’s about all the relation that MOHAA bears to its predecessors. The game is broken up into six distinct missions (each with several sub-levels) that span the length of the war. These missions take you from the US campaign in North Africa to commando raids in Norway, to Omaha Beach, to the hedgerows and bombed out cities of France, and finally deep into Germany itself.



SIDEBAR: 500MHz P2 or Athlon

128MB RAM

8x CDROM

1.2 GB HD space

16MB OpenGL accelerator

FS Says:

1GHz+ P3 or Athlon

512MB RAM

GeForce 3 or Radeon 8500

Graphics and Sound

Page:: ( 2 / 9 )

She’s gorgeous…

With the graphics settings turned up all or most of the way, Allied Assault is one of the prettier games we’ve played in a long time. The texturing isn’t quite on a par with RTCW, but arguing between the two is like debating whether you’d rather date Heidi Klum or Britney Spears. Both make for worthwhile eye candy. Character models are exquisitely detailed with facial expressions, widely varying styles of clothing, and tons of equipment (canteens, shovels, and the like) hanging off them. Weapon models in hand and on the ground are both attractive, and uniquely distinctive, making it easy to discern what type of gun an enemy is holding. Clearly the developers have done their homework on what the guns of WWII look like, and how they operate. Vehicles like tanks and aircraft have also been painstakingly modeled after their real-life counterparts.

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…but she’s very high maintenance

The downside to all of this is the hefty system requirements. I played MOHAA’s single player campaign (see sidebar for my systems) at 32 bit color, with most of the model detail, curve detail, and terrain details on their highest or near highest setting, full entity lighting, and volumetric smoke. At first I was able to plod through at 1024x768, while putting up with lossy framerate during big firefights. As the missions wore on, and more and more enemies came on screen, these settings became unacceptably slow. I had to punch it down to 800x600. In multiplayer where framerate = life, forget about it. I had to knock off the shadows, set simple models, move it to 16 bit color, shut off dynamic lighting, and volumetric smoke to stay competitive. For a while now we’ve been waiting for legitimate reasons to need a GeForce 3. MOHAA might be one of the first reasons for me to run out and get one. Make no mistake – you need a beefy machine to run the game the way it was meant to be seen.

Crank up the Speakers

One area where Medal of Honor stands head and shoulders above the rest is in the sound department. Its sound effects are motion-picture quality exquisite, particularly with the weapons. It’s extraordinary the way you can hear the sniper rifle echo after you fire it, and listen to the fumbling and clicking as you work the bolt to load a new round into the breech. The Thompson lets loose with a rapid thump-thumping of its huge .45ACP rounds, while the smaller caliber German MP40 submachine gun has a higher pitched ratatat. Also noteworthy is the distinctive “plink” of the M1 Garand rifle ejecting a spent clip when you empty it. Ambient sound effects add to the atmosphere. German soldiers yell at each other in German, distant wolves howl in the forest, rain pitter patters on the ground, and planes drone overhead. The Omaha level will leave you as breathless and disoriented as when you first watched Saving Private Ryan.

MOHAA’s soundtrack is perfectly executed. Its rich orchestral scores inspire at just the right moments, fade into the background at the appropriate times, and introduce anxiety before major events.



SIDEBAR: Athlon 1.1GHz

256MB RAM

SB Live!

GeForce 2 GTS

(office computer)

P3 933MHz

256MB RAM

SB Live!

GeForce 2 GTS

(home)

Gameplay

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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.

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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.

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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.



SIDEBAR: I haven’t had this much fun in a single player FPS since No One Lives Forever, which was also full of scripted sequences and imaginative levels.

More gameplay

Page:: ( 4 / 9 )

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.

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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?

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Multiplayer

Page:: ( 5 / 9 )

Afterthought

The one sad thing about MOHAA is that multiplayer seems to have been very much an afterthought. Four standard game types are included – Free For All, Team Deathmatch, Round-based match, and Objective-based match. Objective-based Match is MOHAA’s answer to RTCW’s heralded multiplayer objective-based games, but it’s not done as well. The maps are generally large, affording a good amount of room for maneuvering, and hiding, but the problem is that deaths are permanent. There’s no periodic respawn as in RTCW or medics to revive you. What this means is that almost all matches degenerate into team DM. The objectives hardly ever get completed before one of the teams gets wiped out and the other wins by default.

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Weapon Balance

Unlike the single player game, multi MOHAA only allows players to carry one primary weapon, and a pistol. You can choose any weapon to spawn with, depending on your side. Allied get the M1 Garand, 1903 sniper rifle, Thompson, BAR, Bazooka, or Shotgun. Axis get the Mauser, Mauser Kar98, MP40, Sturmgewehr, Panzerschreck, or Shotgun.

One of the more dominant weapons in multiplayer is the shotgun. Skilled players need only close the distance on opponents, before they pump usually just one load of buckshot into their victim for a quick kill. Submachine guns seem pointless, as the BAR and Sturmgewehr also offer rapid fire with better long range accuracy. The sniper rifles are great for use on MOHAA’s large outdoor maps, but the regular American rifle, the M1 Garand, has its use as well b/c of its semi automatic nature and larger 8 bullet clip. As one player said, “it’s like a rapid fire railgun.” The non-sniper variant of the German Mauser seems to be the odd one out. It doesn’t feature any zoom, and is single shot, bolt action, a distinct disadvantage to the M1 Garand.

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Other notes

One thing that’s worth noting is that every dead player in MOHAA multi drops 50 health. If you’re skilled (and lucky), it’s possible to go on huge killing sprees without dying by simply picking up the many health packs lying around. However, death quite often comes instantaneously. It only takes a few bullets from any gun to bring you down, and in the case of the sniper rifle or shotgun, maybe only one shot. A well placed grenade can often kill three and four men at a time. That brings us to another point – every player spawns with six grenades. These are powerful and can be thrown good distances, making grenade spamming quite a common tactic in team play.



SIDEBAR: MOHAA comes packaged in a new box size that saves space. It’s about the size of two DVD boxes taped together.

Ballistics Report

Page:: ( 6 / 9 )

Pros

Best single player campaign in years: Tons of entertaining scripted scenes, thoughtful level design and mission objectives, and several surprises will keep players on their toes and interested from start to finish. Everyone raves about the Omaha level, but that’s not even close to the best MOHAA has to offer.

Gorgeous graphics and lush sound: The visuals are quite good, and the sound is simply extraordinary. Are you playing a game, or watching a movie? It’s hard to tell sometimes. The soundtrack is spirited and fitting throughout the game.

Variety in settings: The six single player missions are discontinuous, yes, but they provide great breaks in scenery. North African villages, German towns, snowy forests, bombed out French cities, and vast underground bunkers mean you’ll never feel like you’re in the same old place again.

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Cons

Multiplayer is lackluster: Both the execution and the interface woes make MOHAA multiplayer pale even more in comparison to the stellar single player game. Objective-based match is mis-labeled. In practice, it’s just round-based team deathmatch

Steep system requirements: OK so I’m just complaining because I still don’t feel like shelling out the scratch for a new GeForce 3 or Radeon 8500.

Some of the sniper levels are annoying: A couple of the sniper-filled levels are annoying (where the heck am I getting shot from?!?!), but not so much so as to overshadow the many brilliantly designed missions.

The ending sucks: But that’s ok, because this isn’t a Squaresoft game. We played it for the gameplay, not to watch movies.






SIDEBAR: I play MOHAA online as “GX-CalBear” Better look for me soon b/c I don’t forsee myself playing multiplayer MOHAA for too much longer.

Verdict

Page:: ( 7 / 9 )

Gallery 1

Page:: ( 8 / 9 )

Gallery 2

Page:: ( 9 / 9 )