 Medal of Honor for Sony Playstation
So, do you think Steven Spielberg has something against the Nazis? They're the antagonists in two of the three Indiana Jones movies, Schindler's List, and again in Saving Private Ryan. What do you think his problem is, anyway? All that torture and genocidal rampage, or something? Come on, the Nazis made great cars! So now, in the first offering from the video game division of Spielberg's Dreamworks partnership, here the dependable old Nazis are again as the ultimate evil that must be stamped out. Can't we all get along?
Medal Of Honor is a first-person shooter in the well-worn tracks of Doom, Quake, Goldeneye, and so on. The setting is much like that of the original first-person shooter, Castle Wolfenstein. You play the part of Jimmy Patterson, an agent in the British OSS, and you are sent deep into the battlefields of Europe to thwart various Nazi plans and eventually to disable the Nazi war machine entirely.
The feel of the game is a lot more like Syphon Filter than one of the straightforward shooters. Many of the missions in MOH are simply straightforward shoot-everything-that-moves type levels, but several of them require stealth. You may find yourself behind enemy lines in a German officer's uniform and carrying papers, and you will have to present the papers when asked. You will also have to avoid contact with certain enemies in some stages, or they will recognize you ("You're Jimmy Patterson!" the German officer shouts in his accented English) and raise an alarm. The mission set-up is also similar to Syphon Filter, in that there are certain objectives that you have to complete before the stage can be successfully completed. At the end of each mission, you will be given a rating, which is dependent on how much health you have left at the end of the level, and how many enemies you have killed. If you get the highest rating on enough missions, you can unlock secret characters and levels for use in the game's semi-entertaining multiplayer mode, and several cheats which can be used during the single player game.
The game controls nicely, with the requisite use of the controller's shoulder buttons for crouching, aiming, strafing, and so forth. The game also supports Dual Shock, which can give you quite a jolt if you stumble into the line of fire of a machine gun nest. Graphically, they managed to do an excellent job given the evermore stretched limitations of the Playstation hardware – pop-up is minimal except in some outdoor areas, and clipping is occasional but never distracting. There are some excellent animations in your enemies as well – they'll react appropriately to where you shoot them, favoring a wounded leg, dropping quickly after a head shot, and some will even spasmodically fire off rounds from their weapons in their death throes. My personal favorite, though, has to be when you knock the helmet off an enemy with a head shot, which is accompanied by a satisfying "plink!" (You can even knock their helmets off without harming them.) The programmers even added the nice detail of bullet holes appearing when your shots hit walls or other objects. Along with these nice touches come a couple of glaring problems, however. One is the tendency for some bullet holes to hang in mid-air just to the side of an object, and the other is the fact that enemies will often fly backwards when they're shot from behind.
The sound in the game is absolutely phenomenal. The constant shouts of your pursuers seem to come from all around. Most often the voices are speaking in German, but from time to time, you will hear English; in one memorable stage, you hear a German voice coming over a loudspeaker, telling you in English ("Attention American commando!") that you have no hope of escape, and to drop your weapons. The various weapons all sound excellent, from the pop-pop of your pistol, the booming thunder of the shotgun, and the incredible racket made by the fixed machine guns you find in several stages. The real effort in the sound department, though, apparently went into the soundtrack. The music is amazing, maybe the best game soundtrack I've ever heard. The music is always appropriate to the mood of the stage, and it's of the highest quality, sounding like it could be used for the next Indiana Jones movie. Dreamworks Interactive obviously utilized a bit of Spielberg's influence here, and they got the most out of it.
Medal Of Honor ends up being a seriously entertaining game with only a few minor problems. A few graphical bugs are far from enough to detract from the game's many strong points – it's addicting playablility, challenging but never extreme difficulty level, nice level structure, and the amazing sound. The game does feature a multiplayer level, where the levels are pretty much smaller versions of the actual levels, but it's only you and your opponent, and with the limitations inherent in single-screen multi-player, it's only interesting briefly for a short time. The cheats can also add some fun, particularly the one which causes all weapons to fire at four times their normal rate. If you've been clamoring for a good first-person shooter on the Playstation, you'd be hard pressed to find a better one than Medal Of Honor. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm headed over to our Loud Bassoon videogames division, where we're working on the world's first second-person shooter. It'll be revolutionary, I tells ya!
Review by ICE |