The new Medal of Honour released in October 2010 is an interesting fish indeed. I have read many reviews which drew comparisons to Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 and Battlefield Bad Company 2. I do not believe these comparisons are helpful.

This game is entirely different to these 2 games for a number of reasons. Firstly Call of Duty requires you to invest a lot of time in order to be successful in the multiplayer arena as it is set up to reward players with plenty of game changing unlocks and is subject to a horrendous amount of hacks and exploits. Medal of Honour while it has a series of unlocks; none of them are game changers in the same way as Call of Duty and in my 35 hours or so multiplayer time logged I have not encountered anyone using exploits/ hacks.

This game is also different to Battlefield Bad Company 2 which incidentally was created by the same Swedish developers (Dice). It differs from Bad Company in that the terrain is not fully destructible, there is a maximum of one type of vehicle per map (Tank only) and the maps are not as large.

Now that the comparisons’ are out of the way on to the verdict for Medal of Honour.

I can hand on heart say that I really enjoy this game for it's differences from other "Modern warfare" shooters. While it borrows some of the ideas from other shooters like kill streaks, unlocks etc all are grounded in reality meaning that all are currently available military weapons, perks and upgrades.

While some might decry the brutalness of the multiplayer in that only a couple of bullets from almost any gun can kill you; it really does bring home the fact that you should not "run and gun" and that this type of tactic is not used by any countries militaries around the world. Players spend most of their time with their heads down behind cover or inching their way forward to better positions while their team mates cover their advance.

Graphics and performance wise this game runs exceptionally well and looks wonderful on my gaming rig offering a minimum of 60 frames per second (measured by fraps) on a i7 860 processor, 8 gigs of ram and a single gtx 460 1 gigabyte card. I have not noticed any stability issues at all.

There are four modes in multiplayer:

Team Assault - similar to team death match.
Sector control - similar to the battlefield series conquest mode.
Combat mission - similar to Bad Company’s gold rush
and another mode (the name eludes me) that is similar to call of duties sabotage mode.

Recent information suggests another few maps and another game mode has been confirmed as DLC for x box 360 and PS3 owners though no love yet for PC owners like me.

All of these modes can be played in hardcore mode which ups the ante again.

In conclusion based on my experiences with this game I am going to buck the trend and give it a 9/10 as a significant departure from the CoD run and gun and BC2 blow everything to smithereens games.

I expect this game to maintain a significant fan base even in the face of the next instalment of CoD which will be released in Early November 2010.

Thanks Dice for another great game. You can now get back to work on BF3.

Good luck and may the force be with you.

"A surprisingly good game"

9 Excellent