Has Medal Of Honour Warfighter come up to it's expectations to challenge the likes of EA's Battlefield and Activision's Call Of Duty: Black Ops 2? Let's find out..........
Unlike the macho military shooters that inspired it,
Medal of Honor Warfighter
wants you to consider the effects of violence on those responsible for
it. Such appeals to a player’s humanity are bold but risky moves in a
military shooter, where countless corpses of faceless terrorists pile up
at your feet.
Warfighter strives for this by giving you a genuine impression of
what it’s like to live as a Tier 1 operator, the elite operatives at the
center of the modernized Medal of Honor series. It’s clear from the
first cutscene all the way to the end credits that developer Danger
Close has the utmost respect for the extraordinary skills and bravery of
these soldiers. If Medal of Honor extended the same level of respect to
its players, Warfighter might have accomplished more than its numerous
significant failures and lack of player agency has allowed.
The video game industry perpetuates a number of tiresome trends, but
none is more remarked-upon than the reign of the realistic military
shooter. Ever since 2007's (quite good)
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare,
the world of video gaming has seen shooter after shooter after shooter
after shooter, all set in modern times, all dedicated to the deft
recreation of the latest in man-killing machinery. Given the
earth-shattering financial success these types of games find, casual
observers could be forgiven for assuming that all gamers prefer to view
the world through a reflex sight down the barrel of a gun. "Don't be
silly young man," the old woman replied. "It's reflex sights all the way
down!"
Medal of Honor Warfighter has the dubious distinction
of being the Ultimate Brown Military Shooter Of All Time. It's so
brazenly unremarkable, its storytelling so amateurish, its action so
rote, that it feels like a master class in middling modern warfare. Put
another way: I've been playing the game for hour upon hour and the
nicest thing I can say about it is that the flashlights look pretty
good.
Well, that's not entirely true. There are exactly two non-flashlight things I enjoyed about
Warfighter's single-player campaign. First, the fact that you can lean. This makes it possible not only to
take cover while engaged in a firefight, but to
use it. This is wonderful! As I plodded my way through the repetitive shooting galleries that
Warfighter
calls "firefights," I came to greatly value the fact that I could run
up to a corner and peek around it. I would run up to the corner, lean
out, shoot some guys, lean back, and reload. And then lean out, shoot
some guys, lean back, and reload. It didn't exactly make the game fun,
but it was a welcome change from the disorienting "run entirely out of
cover, shoot, run back, reload" rhythm of
Call of Duty.
The multiplayer, at least, shows Medal of Honor getting serious. The
online structure here, heavily inspired by Criterion's superb Autolog
system, effortlessly outpaces that of Call of Duty and its anaemic
Elite. The homepage quickly tracks the types of game you like playing,
putting them front-and-centre, while a separate social hub (urgh) tracks
friends and clans.
The biggest problem with Warfighter online is
the bland game itself. The obvious competition is COD and EA's own
Battlefield, both of which have a more distinctive identity: the former
an arcade-style environment for lone gunners, the latter a much
weightier and more team-focussed shooter.
Warfighter treads an
unhappy line between the two. Its shooting is responsive, and there are
all the game modes you'd expect, but there's nothing here that hasn't
been done better elsewhere. On top, some parts are just plain odd – in
certain multiplayer modes, bizarre interstitials play as the teams
'change ends'. So your grizzled army dudes, who are shooting each other
to death, walk all manly-like across the stage, eyeballing each other.
It's
absolutely nuts, and also sums up a bit of the identity crisis under
Warfighter's skin – the reason, in my opinion, why the game's slightly
offensive rather than merely another military FPS. There's a great deal
of technical talent behind Warfighter, but not much in the way of
ambition or imagination. This is why the game is so similar to Call of
Duty.
What the game lacks in originality, it makes up for in functionality.
Your tutorial takes place in a Pakistani-mountain-embedded terrorist
training course which, in a body-swapping twist, you actually raid as a
SEAL later. There are also several sections where you'll guide a
rocket-firing MUSA demolitions robot via remote control. These may be
isolated moments of creativity, but no-one can say Warfighter isn't
solid at its foundation.
Multiplayer is no exception; it treads the line between Call of
Duty's fast-paced close-quarters gunplay and Battlefield's 3 weighty
heft, borrowing the latter's Frostbite 2 engine though dropping the
framerate down and removing environmental destruction.
There's a persistent air of "what's going on?" that can't be excused by
the chaos of war. Too often, the game more closely resembles a
low-budget wannabe than a potential blockbuster from a major publisher. I
encountered all of these quirks and more during the six hours it took
me to trudge through the campaign on normal difficulty, but no single
problem was more damaging than the terrible AI.
Call of Duty at least knows how to use smoke and mirrors to hide the
puppetry behind its elaborately constructed theme-park experiences.
Warfighter attempts the same trick but lacks the presentational skills
to sell the misdirection. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the
behaviour of your squad, the members of which can often be found
crouched yards behind the action, going through their idle animation
while you fight alone, or shooting at a piece of scenery. They'll stand
inches away from an enemy trading shots that do nothing. On occasion,
they'll even vanish completely.
These moments don't even come during interesting combat scenarios.
The bulk of the game is simply a duck-shoot, with sporadic interludes
for reliable genre standbys such as sniper sections, turret missions and
a couple of car chases. The closest the game comes to innovating in
mission design comes as you try to escape Dubai with a high-value target
stuffed in the boot of your car. Navigating the roads while avoiding
the security cars searching for you is a clever idea - Pac-Man as a
vehicular Tom Clancy stealth game - but it doesn't last long and you're
quickly back to smashing and crashing your way down linear routes.
All the technical snafus make a mockery of the game's humourless
reverence for the real-life fighting men it seeks to honour. Based on
what you see in this game, Tier One soldiers are not elite warriors but
barely competent morons who will throw a grenade into a corner for no
reason and then run to stand next to it. Viewed against this laughable
backdrop, the game's queasy paean to American superiority in the face of
irrational foreign savagery is horribly misplaced. If it were any more
competent, the tub-thumping jingoism might be offensive rather than
simply tragic.
After the launch of EA's another FPS the MOH Warfighter didn't go that well, so the game is quite average in terms of gameplay and good enough in terms of graphics.
| Minimum System Requirements: |
| Recommended System Requirements: |
| CPU: |
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz / Athlon X2 2.7GHz |
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| CPU: | Intel Core 2 Quad 3GHz / AMD Phenom II X4 3GHz |
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| VGA: |
NVidia 8800 GTS 512 MB VRAM or better / ATI Radeon 3870 512 MB VRAM |
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| VGA: | NVidia GTX 560 1024 MB VRAM or better / ATI Radeon 6950 1024 MB VRAM |
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| DX: |
DirectX 10.1 compatible |
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| http://gamesystemrequirements.com/ |
| HDD: |
At least 20GB of free space |
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| HDD: | At least 20GB of free space |
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| ODD: |
CD/DVD ROM drive (required for installation only) |
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| ODD: | CD/DVD ROM drive (required for installation only) |
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| Network: |
1 MB DSL KBPS or faster Internet Connection |
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| Network: | 1 MB DSL KBPS or faster Internet Connection |
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| Recommended peripheral: | Keyboard and Mouse |
Rating:8.3/10
Medal of Honor Warfighter has the dubious distinction
of being the Ultimate Brown Military Shooter Of All Time. It's so
brazenly unremarkable, its storytelling so amateurish, its action so
rote, that it feels like a master class in middling modern warfare. Put
another way: I've been playing the game for hour upon hour and the
nicest thing I can say about it is that the flashlights look pretty
good.
What the game lacks in originality, it makes up for in functionality.
Your tutorial takes place in a Pakistani-mountain-embedded terrorist
training course which, in a body-swapping twist, you actually raid as a
SEAL later. There are also several sections where you'll guide a
rocket-firing MUSA demolitions robot via remote control. These may be
isolated moments of creativity, but no-one can say Warfighter isn't
solid at its foundation.
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