Medal of Honor: Airborne

For the past couple of days I've been playing the latest instalment in the long line of Medal of Honor Games. I played the first two games on the Playstation, and then Frontlines on PS2 and Allied Assault on PC. I didn't care so much for the first two games which were basically Wolfenstein 3D with better graphics. Frontlines and Allied Assault were a big improvement however, adding atmosphere and intensity to first person shooters in a way never before seen. The Omaha and Utah beach levels were grondbreaking - I can still feel that cold Channel water lapping around my waist as I waded ashore, M1 held high, with tracers whipping past my head, the roar or mortars, artillery and gunfire. I can still hear the ringing in my ears as a shell landed nearby, the image of the GI who couldn't take it; sheltering behind a tank trap and rocking back and forth praying for home. It was strong stuff, the only problem was the unfortunate sense of deja vu. I hadn't been there before, but I'd seen it before. This, and some other levels, were so indistinguishable from Stephen Spielberg's classic Saving Private Ryan that it took something a way from the experience. Not much, because this was still uncharted territory for a video game, but something. What did significantly damage the game was that apart from a few awesome set piece battles (the beach, the church, the radar bunker) the game was the same as the old Playstation iterations. You spent most of your time on your own in corridors or in outdoor areas that might as well be corridors shooting Nazis who might as well have been stormtroopers (er... that would be the Star Wars kind, not the Nazi kind).

That, and the tendency of Electronic Arts to release unadulterated poop, caused me grave concerns over what might become of Airborne. Airborne is different, however. There is a lot which is new to the series and the game certainly breaks away from the old lone-gunman approach and goes for something a lot closer to Call of Duty - which is by far the best WW2 shooter in my opinion. Airborne features the now-familiar iron sights system, but with a subtle yet important twist. The feature, popularised by Call of Duty, essentially means that the player can increase his accuracy by clicking the right mouse button (or middle mouse button or whatever you have bound it to) in order to aim down his sights (as opposed to firing from the hip). Different games implement it in slightly different ways but Airborne does something I've not seen before: when you aim down the sights you automatically go into a sort of 'fixed mode'. You can still aim using the mouse but you keyboard keys no longer move you around the environment. Rather, they lean your character left and right, and make him get lower or higher. Quite a few games have lean features now, and virtually all have a crouch button (and often a prone button too) but this is a little different. Not only does it make it somewhat easier and more natural to perform the various actions, it also encourages the player to stay put. In Call of Duty, for instance, you can run about while using the iron sights and so combine accuracy with mobility. Airborne makes you choose between the two. This creates a more structured battle where you get behind cover and fight from a static position and the enemy does the same, and then maybe you throw some grenades and run in shooting from the hip. You can move around (very slowly) whilst holding shift and aiming down the sights, but the designers definitely seem to have discouraged it - this seems to be more for positioning yourself in cover than close quarters fighting or 'on the go' shooting.

There is also a sprint function, which is another feature becoming increasingly common in shooters, but Airborne's is one of the most well implemented - your angle of view actually changes and there's a bit of a blur effect. There's no stamina bar to run out, which is good because you'll often find yourself having to sprint across the map to find a medpack. And that brings me to something I didn't like about Airborne: the health system. Most game designers have figures out that scattering packets of health around the map is a sucky way of healing the player. Allied Assault had medics in a couple of levels, but they're absent in Airborne. An increasingly popular health system is the recharge system - whereby the player need only find a quiet place to rest for his health to slowly recharge. This is much more natural and subtle than making players hunt out magic bandaids which, as it does in Airborne, can turn the game into an easter egg hunt at times.

Despite the lack of medics, there are plenty of allies for you to fight alongside. Sometimes you'll go to an objective and your buddies will be somewhere else but usually they go where you're going. They don't follow you as they do in some games though, which I guess is quite good - you can leave a battle for a few moments to procure health or ammunition, and come back and they're still fighting or have maybe even won the battle for you. If this game is anything to go on, however, American paratroopers are pretty frickin' stupid. They're constantly standing in front of you and blocking your view of the enemy. They also have the annoying habit of randomly running backwards several feet towards you for no apparent reason in the middle of a battle.

In one mission, I had feared the developers had given in to their lone-gunman urges and 'done a railyard'. By that I refer to the beginning of the final mission of Allied Assault where you and a trainfull of elite soldiers are sent in to a German complex to do something entirely unmemorable. "Excellent," I thought, "I like playing alongside allies." Only, when the freight car door is slid open the wooden walls are perforated by enemy fire and low and behold your character is the only one to survive, setting the scene for a solo mission. In Airborne each mission begins with a short sequence where you are in the C47 flying over the drop zone. You then get to time your jump and steer your parachute down onto the battlefield - allowing you to land anywhere and ensuring that each battle is always a little different. In this particular mission your plane is hit by anti-aircraft fire and everyone but you is killed. Luckily, yours isn't the only plane and there's still a cohort of friendlies earth-side.

The plane scenes do help set the mood and set you on edge a little, and the parachute drop genuinely adds a new tactical element to the game as well as increasing replayability. The map itself is entirely linear allowing you to complete objectives in any order. Some objectives do get a little linear with only one or two routes to them, but others can be approached from many or any direction. Unfortunately every map follows an identical template: you drop, you complete a number of dispersed objectives, a radio call summons you to an arbitrary location, a scripted cut-scene opens up a new area of the map with a new objective. This got a little old, the the cut-scenes were pretty dreadful looking more like a bad 1960s war movie than Spielberg's masterpiece.In addition, the objectives themselves are of the usual "shoot the radio equipment" and "plant the dynamite" variety. It would have been nice to see something more original there.

That sums up the game a little, in a way. Apart from the ability to choose your starting location and making it harder to move when aiming, Airborne doesn't do anything new. However, it does do what it does well. The audio and visual effects are impressive and produce a very intense experience. One I liked in particular was the blue muzzle flash produced when you use a compensator. Which brings me to: upgrades. Every gun has a variety of upgrades that you can earn as you gain experience with it. For instance, the Thompson submachinegun can gain a compensator and a vertical grip to reduce recoil, a 50 round drum magazine to increase ammunition capacity and so on. This makes up for the fact that we've used every weapon in the game already in a dozen games - after all, there were only so many guns in WW2. It used to be that grenades were a regular weapon like any other, then Halo shook things up and made them a separate feature - allowing you to instantly throw one with the press of a button and negating the need to switch to them manually. Half Life 2 was one game that didn't follow this new trend and I thought it was the worse for it, but Airborne does it well. A dedicated button is set aside to switch directly to nades, and pressing it again will switch between the various grenade types. A ticking noise aids in timing your cooked grenades. Some might complain that this dumbs down that particular tactic but I thought it was a good idea.

What is most unusual about Airborne is that it has all of these features and effects that we're used to seeing in realistic and near-realistic games like Red Orchestra, Armed Assault and Call of Duty, yet Airborne really isn't a realistic game. Enemies can soak up multiple chest hits from an M1 Garand, although there is a blood effect it only seems to play once in every hundred kills, enemies seem to slowly suffocate to death rather than being blown to the floor, there are a number of equipment/terminology/history/uniform errors and so on. The toughness of enemies is the main thing though. In Red Orchestra it's one shot to kill both you and the enemies but in this way Airborne plays more like the corridor shooters of old. However, when combined with modern features like iron sights it makes for a fun and interesting game. If you get one game this month, get Crysis. If you get two games this month, get Call of Duty 4. But if you get three games this month, get Medal of Honor: Airborne.