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Medal of Honor: Airborne

Published: Mon 10 Dec, 2007 | On:

The United states Airborne infantry has always been held in high regard by most WWII enthusiasts and military buffs, with screen productions such as Band of Brothers, and the similarly titled squad based FPS series Brothers in Arms highlighting their exploits, bravery and sacrifice. MOH Airborne does that also, and having had such a high standard set by the Call of Duty series, its clar that EA sat down and thought "How can we give this genre something new and excitiong?", and luckily they managed to do so, but with a few faults in the execution, and with even more blatant cheesey American "We won the war and saved the world" patriotism and the usual complete lack of acknowlegement and respect for all the other countries that comprised the Allied forces. Instead of Jimmy Patterson taking on the entire Nazi war Machinr single handedly, this time you are Boyd Travers, the only soldier capable of acheiving anything amongst a division of incompetant idiots. But before I begin my extensive list of criticism's, I'll start with what makes MOH Airborne worth purchasing.

Each level begins in a transport plane, and from the moment your chute opens you have control. There are generally 2 or 3 safe landing zones, but this is'nt too limiting as you still have a good level of freedom as to where and how you land. Each time you die you drop into the level again with any completed objectives saved, affording you multiple oportunities to find the 5 skill drop sites in each level. Landing on roof tops and in towers gives many good vantage points for sniping, as well as giving MOH Airborne an impressive feeling of scale most other games in the genre lack. These high landing points are also great for just looking around at the beautifly rendered environments, especially in later campaigns.
The level design and pace of the game are booth good, and its quite pretty to loook at, and there is a great upgrade system allowing you to earn weapons upgrades for each weapon, based on actual authentic feild upgrades of the era. adding a scope, 20 round clip and a grenade launcher attatchmant to the Gewher 43 make it quite the killing machine, or getting enough grenade kills to earn yourself a satchel allows you to carry enough grenades to blow stuff up lots, yay. Though very, very short, its somewhat replayable due to the desire to find all the skill drops and upgrade all the weapons, but moving on...

...all in all I enjoyed the game (while it lasted, which was not very long at all), but I have a love for all things WWII to the point where some would consider me 'not quite right in the head', so having said that, hers whats not so great...

The AI is utter, utter rubbish, for your allies and enemies alike, your moron sqad mates will often step in front of you while you are firing and then whinge at you for shooting them, if the game punished you for friendly fire I'd have taken it out of my xbox 360 and thrown it at the wall in frustration. The Germans are even stupider, to the point where if I were German I'd be insulted. They will be standing next to you, but as opposed to shoot you, they'll run toward the neares crate or sand bag pile, run around it in a circle, then jump over it to charge and melee attack you, and sometimes they'll get away with it because at first you might assume they're on your side as they may have actually been running along side you not shooting for several seconds before this stagering display of idiocy. If I were too focus on the AI anymore this review would become a novelette, so I'll move on to the fact that the game is so short if it were a migit its migit friends would hassle it for being shorter than them. I completed it on the hardest setting in 3 days, and thats not constant play as I also have a life. If you were to play it on normal or easy and failed to complete on the first day, you suck, simple as that. And dont think it will redeem itself in multiplayer, because it is glitchy, very glithchy. But the thing I found most amusing was that near the end of the game, you encounter semi invincible supper Nazis that can cop a whole clip from an MP44 and not die who carry MG42s which they fire from the hip, this destroys any illusion of authenticity, which technically the game had done quite well up to this point.

In summary, if your a WWII buff like myself, MOH Airborne may be worth puchasing, as I said, I enjoyed it quite alot despite its short comings. For the rest of you, hire it out and spend the real cash on Call of Duty 4, its considerably better in every way possible.