Medal of Honor: Airborne (Preview)

The Good

Medal of Honor: Airborne hits you right away with its key gameplay element, parachuting. You start in a plane with your squad and fly to the mission zone. In the demo your plane comes under attack by friendlies as you enter the battle zone but luckily you and your squad are able to jump. Your squad mates start jumping out one by one until it is your turn. Now here is where it gets cool. I stopped walking at the edge of the plane to admire the landscape. Suddenly I feel a jolt and I am free falling. Then comes the amazing revelation, my squad mates pushed me out! How cool is that? I soon regained control and was floating to the ground. Now here is another great element: You can land wherever you want. That's right, you have free reign over where you land. However, some places are better than others. The "safe zones" are marked by green flares. The safe zones have no enemies but are a little further away from your objectives. You can take the risk of landing closer but you may be killed before you recover from landing. There are two ways to land. One is where you hold the A button right before impact to slow yourself and cushion your fall. The second is where you hit the ground hard or at a bad angle and you take longer to get up. All in all, this parachuting element is very enjoyable.

The weapons are classic World War 2 fair: The Tommy gun, the M1 Garand, and a few German weapons. The game features a reticle (I don't like reticles in WWII shooters but thats just me) but it is practically worthless. You won't hit anything at long range without aiming. Aiming is done by pulling the Left Trigger and brings the gun up to your eyes. You use the sight for better accuracy and this is really the only way to kill anything. Aiming also presents an interesting option, leaning. When aiming you can lean, duck, and (if crouched) stand up. It's great for popping in and out of cover quickly. There is another thing you can do while leaning but I am not sure if the leaning feature was designed to do this. You can dodge bullets. I noticed that I took less hits while leaning all over the place than I did while standing still. Think Stranglehold's standoffs but all the time and without bullet time.

The weapons can be upgraded as you play. You earn experience for a weapon by killing enemies with that weapon. Your experience gain is shown by a gauge on the weapon icon. the weapon icon starts out as a silhouette but fills up with blue as you gain experience. Once your gun icon is fully blue, you must kill an enemy a certain way to get the upgrade. The only way I found you could get the upgrade was by killing an enemy while using the sight. This prompted a "Marksman" award as level 1 and a "Sharpshooter" award as level 2. The upgrades are different depending on the weapon. The level one upgrade for the M1 Garand give you a better grip and increases your accuracy while on the pistol it gives you a new holster that allows you to draw your pistol faster. On the German rifle the level one upgrade is a better reload bolt that increases the rate of fire and the level 2 replaces the bullet by bullet reload with a clip thus increasing reload time dramatically. This is a great addition that keeps the game interesting and makes the player want to try out all the weapons to see what their upgrades are.

The visuals are slightly above mediocre. There are some cool textures and lighting but there are some parts of the characters that seem a bit unreal. There is this glow of sorts around the edges of some of the character models and some of the edges are pretty rough. I saw some pixels at times too. The visuals are definitely not on par with Gears or Bioshock but they are acceptable.

The health system of Medal of Honor: Airborne is quite unique. It features a mix of the old school health packs and the current recharging health craze. In Airborne, your character's heath is divided into sections. In the demo the health is split into four segments. If you take damage and hide, your health will recharge but there is a catch. Your health will only regenerate to the end of the current segment of health. So if you took about 60% damage, your health will only recharge to the halfway point, the end of the second segment. All is not lost however. You can regain lost segments by finding health packs which recharge one segment each. This blend of both old and new health systems keeps the realistic feel of a WWII shooter but also keeps the health pack hunting to a minimum.

One nice aspect of the game is its open world. Like I said before, the player can parachute anywhere in the level. The player can choose to land in the safe zone, a danger zone, or even right next to the objective. However you better be a Medal of Honor pro if you choose to land next to the objective because that area has a small army guarding it. You can also land on the roofs and jump from roof to roof in certain places. Another path in the demo that I discovered was after destroying the two Anti-Air turrets on top of the Mayor's house, you can climb out a window on the second story of the house and take the roof route from there. I was able to go all the way to another objective by just using the roofs and bypassed the entire Nazi force guarding it. Hopefully all the levels will have this open ended environment.

Another cool feature that I didn't even know about was Skillful Landings. You achieve a skillful landing when you parachute onto a hard to reach or unique place that you would not normally attempt to land on. The one I discovered was near the mansion on an old stone lookout tower. You get the Skillful Landing by landing inside the tower and on the catwalks. There are probably others in the demo but as of the time of this preview I have not found them. After some research I found that you can earn achievements for finding all of the Skilled Landings so this will add to the replay value of the game.

The Bad

Sadly no game is perfect and Airborne is not exempt from this rule.

The main problem I had with Airborne was the AI. It was both too good and too stupid. How is that possible you ask? Well, for starters, the AI will see you when you are hiding in the shadows 100 feet away and will hit you with unreal accuracy. However, when you get up close they will sometimes not even see you. There have been many times I have had the enemy stand right next to me and not attack or look at me and do nothing. They also have the bad habit of getting stuck in doors. They do not just get stuck when more than one attempt to go through at the same time. I have seen them turn and try to run towards me while halfway through the door and so they are just running into the wall. I remember other shooters with this problem...from 5 years ago. Simply pathetic in this day and age of gaming.

A second problem with the game is the lack of death penalties. Just like in Bioshock when you die you just respawn as a new paratrooper falling form the sky. All of your previously completed objectives are completed. In fact the only thing you lose is your weapon upgrades. this lack of serious penalties will lead to abuse. I found that if I was in a tough spot I would just kill myself, respawn, and drop behind that choke point and continue the mission.

One last problem is the sheer chaos. When in the heat of battle both allies and enemies are running all over the place and passing each other by without even noticing each other. It comes to the point where the player cannot tell friend from foe because they look very similar and are all intermingled. It got frustrating to spend a whole clip on someone only to find out they are your ally and that the guy you thought was your ally is right behind you smacking you in the back of the head. I think they could have done a better job controlling the flow of the battles.

Overall Impression - Mostly Enjoyable

Medal of Honor: Airborne has some great, fresh, and enjoyable gameplay elements. The parachuting, hybrid health system, and upgradable weapons make this game a blast to play and is a nice breather from the standardized shooters that flood the market today. However, the AI problems and lack of a true death really take away from the experience of a WWII setting.

I have heard some great things about the multi-player portion of the game so hopefully it will make up for the AI problems.

I hope a multi-player demo is released before launch because as the game stands right now I will only rent this game.