Medal of Honour: Airborne (2007)

          A decent twist on an exhausted genre.

XBOX 360, PS3, PC

Positives:

• Interesting take on the FPS Genre
• Decent upgrade system
• Great last two missions
• Impressively accurate sounds

Negatives:

• Parachuting difficult
• AI irritating
• Glitches

Medal of Honour: Airborne marks the 11th game in the famous series and is the first to employ a non-linear gameplay style. What this means, is rather than starting at a fixed location in each mission, you choose where to start. How? By parachuting in.

You start as Private First Class Boyd Travers, a fictional paratrooper of the very real 82nd Airborne Divison whose aim is to wreak havoc by dropping in behind enemy lines. There are six missions after parachute training as you travel from Italy to France to Belgium and eventually, Nazi Germany itself. As you proceed through the game, the enemies gradually increase in difficulty, in what the game rather drily calls ‘Combat Effectiveness’, ranging from the fairly incompetent Italian Blackshirts to fanatical SS Storm Elite.

To counter this gradual change, Travers himself picks up better weapons along the way which range from the Browning Automatic Rifle (affectionately know as the B.A.R) to the fierce Panzerschreck bazooka, all of which can be upgraded in three stages. These upgrades are awarded through kills and head-shots, and generally affect accuracy, amount of ammunition and reload times though certain weapons give a far more explosive upgrade…

In fact, one of the small pleasures of this game is being given an upgrade:  the action enters slow motion to explain the upgrade, also granting (for no clear reason) unlimited ammo for the short slow-mo time.

Another unique feature of the game is its health system, which combines the best (though some may say worst) of regenerating and fixed health. There are four bars of health; if you lose less than a bar before taking cover then it regenerates, but more than a bar requires a health pack, dotted at convenient places around the map.

Of course, none of this would matter if the gameplay itself weren’t good, and luckily standards are fairly high here. Killing each enemy is satisfying, especially with the impressive Springfield sniper, whilst they can at times provide a tough challenge with ‘Accordance AI’. For normal people this simply means that they can adapt to the situation, taking high ground if your squad is entering the building. Or at least, this is what’s meant to happen in theory. In reality, enemies often make EXACTLY the same decisions no matter how you decide to approach the situation, something which effectively involves a lot of crawling, running around, and screaming.

There are other problems too: though parachuting is the real selling-point of the game, you are often lead to certain locations, or ‘skill-drops’ as they are called. Despite each map seeming pretty large, it would be suicide to drop right in the middle of open ground, so your choices can be fairly limiting. Certain glitches also become irritating after a time, such as occasionally failing to kill someone with a bullet to the head; rather than seeing them drop dead to the ground, you see a bullet mark appear in the invisible wall right in front of them. Frustrating to say the least.

However, despite its many faults, this lives up to be an impressive game. Each mission presents at least something in the way of mild (though I would stress mild) story development and challenges, whilst the parachuting feature gives this game decent replay value, allowing it to stand out in the saturated World War Two genre. The penultimate mission in particular was fantastic, with claustrophobic factory complexes and numerous snipers simply laying in wait to take a pop at you. There is also a distinct level of detail in the game, from the enemies right down to the sounds of the weapons themselves. This can be seen on the extras section, where they explain how they recorded the real weapons themselves, and rather than simply reducing the volume of a weapon to signal its distance from you, actively recorded them at different distances, to capture their unique sounds. The meticulous detail is something other games could certainly take tips from, and is part of what makes this a thoroughly enjoyable game to mark my first review.

-GG