Medal of Honor Airborne gets KIA'd

EA's Age old World War two first-person shooter franchise returns for another iteration with "Medal of Honor: Airborne".


The big story this time in the Medal of Honor franchise is the fact that you are now apart of the 82nd airborne division. You play as Boyd Travers as you fight your way through different battles in Europe. Rewinding for a second, it's not really that big of story at all. The way the airborne feature works is kind of neat at first but after a few times it just becomes the same old story. The missions start you out in a plane getting ready to jump. When you do jump, it's a ten second sequence of you staring at your feet. There are "Safe points" throughout the levels marked with green smoke where there are no enemies in the area. There's about three of them per level and frankly, you'd be a fool to land anywhere else because chances are you'll get taken out in a minute or two.

Another annoying thing about Airborne is it's pretty difficult. I'm not going to lie, I played it on casual my first play through and found it quite hard. It's not because of the objectives, it's because the game bombards you with enemies, and each mission feels like your taking on the entire German army...and then some. This wouldn't be so bad if your squad mates IQ was higher than a Chihuahua. Throughout the entire game I think I only saw my allies kill about three enemies. Not only that, but they make stupid moves like running straight at a machine gun or gawking right at a enemy tank. The game boasts how "elite" the airborne unit is; yet they're always running right in front of my machine gun fire. Seriously, they make the guys from S.T.R.I.P.E.S look like navy seals.

A unique feature about the game is that if you kill enough enemies with a certain weapon, you get different additions to it like bayonets, bigger clips, faster reloads etc...Everything in the book but a gun that will take less than eight million rounds to kill an enemy.

There's also the same arsenal of weapons as previously seen in just about every Medal of Honor game under the sun. Machine guns, sub-machine guns, sniper rifles (that's harder to shoot than you think), pistols and so on...Just about nothing is new.

The game also rates your landing depending on how well you did it. There's a "botched" landing, the sloppiest landing of them all, you get this by landing on something like barbed wire or just simply falling down straight. The result is your character taking longer to get up and wield his weapon. A "greased" landing is a normal landing. And a "flared" landing. I have no idea what it is, because the games tutorial never told me, never told me how to do it, what it does, and how it will benefit me.

The graphics are fortunately, half-decent. There are nice explosion effects and the view when you're first parachuting is nice. However the animations are still stiff, and robotic like. And overall, the environments could of been better.

The game is surprisingly short. There’s only six levels in the entire game, each about half an hour long (give or take). None of these levels are slightly interesting however. Just about every one has you planting C4 on something or other. Each level has about four or five objectives to it. Which is where the airborne portion comes into play, you can land at any objective at the beginning of a level or after a death and complete it that way. Either way, it doesn’t really matter, they may as well of asked you where you want to spawn.

The game has a variety of standard multiplayer modes for up to 12 people. The catch is that the Americans parachute in at the beginning of the match and the Axis spawn on the ground. It’s nothing you’ve never seen before and although the parachuting aspect is interesting, it’s not going to convince anyone.

The music is very familiar. Anyone who’s ever played a Medal of Honor game will recognize the main theme song. It’s a lot of orchestral scores that ramp up and down depending on the action.

Overall Medal of Honor: Airborne was a big disappointment. It’s a lot of the same stuff we’ve seen time and time again and not enough new features, which is essential if you’re going up against games like Call of Duty and Brothers in arms. If you absolutely must play every Medal of Honor game known to man you might want to rent it. Anyone else, stick to Halo 3.