There's a special place in my heart for Medal of Honor. Perverse, I know. It’s hardly Jet Set Willy or Sonic. But the original PS1 game brought something fresh and new to the first-person shooter genre; a cinematic style and grittiness that, for those that suckled on the teet of Hollywood’s flavour of war, brought touches of realism to shooters that we’d not seen before.
There are few moments in gaming that are quite as gleeful as when you first witnessed German soldiers reacting to your freshly cooked grenade, scrabbling farcically in an effort to return your hand-delivered goody. Another of those few moments was seeing their bodies being hoisted left and reich (ho ho) from the blast.
So when the phone rang and the voice of The Editor asked if I'd like to review
MoH Warfighter, a little bit of that old glee started to swell in my bosom. The emotion was swiftly quashed when I was asked, oh, can you turn it around sharpish because the review copy has just hit the doormat and it’s in stores in three days. To add a kick in the balls, I’d heard that the previews weren’t good and, to cap it all, the embargo for reviews was the
same day as the game’s US release date. Poor previews is one thing - it happens, and good games come out of it - but for reviews to be embargoed until the game is out - well, that has the stink of garbage.
My opinion was poisoned, which has me in a bit of predicament; on the one hand I'm sat here, disc in console, thinking that I'm prejudiced and have already made up my mind that it's terrible. On the other, if it doesn't turn out as bad as I'm conjuring, I'll end up overrating it because, well, it's actually not so bad after all. Trying to forget the review copy’s eleventh hour arrival, I put the game in the console to be greeted with the news that I must download the patch. A day-zero patch, FFS. It’s not looking great. Hey ho. Let’s push forward.
So, the premise is simple. It’s on the news every day; the world is going to shit at the hands of radical militants. Your job, playing as one of the Teir 1 operators
from the recent Medal of Honor “reboot”, is to erase the filthy heathens from the existence and save the world. Shipped into various locations across the world - Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Dubai, Bosnia, Philippines - your missions vary from the aforementioned extermination to locating and liberating hostages, searching for weapons, sharp-shooting pirates, and evading capture while making off with stolen intel.
