CtN Game Review 36: Medal of Honor (2010)
This was an interesting game upon reflection. It plays like a poor man’s Call of Duty, but carries itself with more respect for the people it’s portraying than CoD. It doesn’t go for the “bro” approach to the military. It instead goes for brotherhood. Does that all pay off? Read on to find out.
THE STORY:
There are probably going to be a few comparisons to Call of Duty throughout this review. I am still judging the game on its own merits, it’s just hard to not make the comparisons that are so obvious.
The first thing of note is that there isn’t really a story to Medal of Honor. This is perfectly fine. For a military shooter like this, we just need an objective, and for a good story, we just need good characters.
Unfortunately Medal of Honor falls flat in this regard. I’m not sure what the main objective was after playing it. I remember what my point a to point b objectives were, but there wasn’t one big mission tying it all together. Like I said this would be fine for a game like this as long as we had some good characters to fight alongside. The game didn’t exactly have that either.
The characters have call signs, but you won’t know who is who from just looking at them. The only person you’ll be able to look at and immediately recognize is Dusty, and that’s only because he has a beard that could slay demons. The rest don’t even have character traits that are memorable.
In the paragraph preceding this review I said that Call of Duty goes for a “bro” approach to its portrayal of the military, whereas Medal of Honor tries for brotherhood. What does that mean? Well call of duty tries to give the military more of a cool factor. To the point that the characters should just be wearing sunglasses all the time. Medal of Honor tried to have it’s characters care about each other. It gave the military a more realistic set of characters.
However, it didn’t exactly work. The brotherhood of the characters doesn’t really come in until the last few missions of the campaign. In between the other soldiers in the fight are just generic people in camoflage that can take an infinite number of bullets to the face, and tell you what to do.
It does come off a bit strange that for an entire the characters just kind of co exist, but never have any meaningful interactions. Then, at the end of the game they all of a sudden are very protective of each other. It’s abrupt and doesn’t help when the story had been nonexistent for ¾ of the game.
In the end the story is not there, but tries to come up with a no man left behind plot that goes nowhere because we know nothing of the characters. So the story gets a 24 out of 40.
THE GAMEPLAY
Another thing that I said in the paragraph before the review was, “Medal of Honor plays like a poor man’s Call of Duty.” So what does that mean? Well basically this game looks and plays like Call of Duty, but not as tight at the controls. There are only three things different in the gameplay between the two.
The first is that there is a running slide. This was my favorite thing to do. It was fun to run around the map and just slide into cover. The second thing you can do is peek around cover.
This makes it sound like the game has more of an emphasis on cover. Not exactly. You can still run around the map and shoot everything unchallenged even on normal difficulty. The problem with it, is that it’s unintuitive. In order to peek you must press the left bumper and then move the analog stick in the direction you want to shoot. This doesn’t sound bad, but think of everything involved now. Left bumper to peek, left trigger to aim down the ironsights, left analog stick to actually do the peeking, right trigger to shoot, right analog stick if you need to aim. That’s a bit much.
The third thing that you can do in this game is that you can repeatedly stab someone with a combat knife to the ground. This was also unusually entertaining. See a dead body on the ground? Well walk up to it and click the right stick and your guy will jump on the dead body and begin stabbing away. It’s a good way to vent.
Other than those things, barely anything is different from Call of Duty. There is sniping sections, AC130 missions, and a couple of on rails vehicle sections. It just doesn’t do any of that particulary well. It’s just average, and that’s what it comes down to. The game is just average. It’s over quickly, and very forgettable.
As such Medal of Honor gets a 28 out of 40. It’s forgettable, short, and doesn’t do much on its own.
THE PRESENTATION
Medal of Honor does step things up a bit in this department. The game does look very good. The character models look very good, and the environments look good….and brown.
Yes indeed, this game is quite brown. I don’t understand why this would be a complaint though. The game does take place in the middle east. So dust makes sense. They definitely do overdo it on the dust, and lens glare in some spots that make it difficult to tell what’s going on. The enemy characters also look alike. They are all in generic looking guys in turbans, because it’s the Taliban this time.
The voice acting is good, in spite of how unmemorable the characters are. In fact one of the Sergeants is played by Yuri Lownthal. As such I called him Sgt. Sasuke throughout the entirety of the game.
Overall parts are great, and others are average leading to a score of 17 out of 20.
So in the end Medal of Honor 2010 gets
24 out of 40 for the story
28 out of 40 for the gameplay and a
17 out of 20 for the presentation equaling a
69 out of 100 or a D+
Pro Tip: Don’t worry about ammo, you can always ask a squad mate for more, and there’s always a couple of them you can go to.
