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Medal of Honor: Airborne

Score: 6.5 / 10

Years ago, the History Channel did a wonderful documentary about the Airborne units, focusing heavily on their use in WWII.  While interviewing a then-current member of the 101st Airborne, the paratrooper related a story about a reunion of Airborne troops past and present.  One old gent from the 82nd Airborne apparently got the younger solder's attention.  The young paratrooper proudly proclaimed he'd made dozens of jumps.  When he asked the vet how many jumps he'd made, the old man replied, "Four."  Somewhat dumbstruck, the younger trooper repeated the number.  The old veteran confirmed the number and went on list them: Sicily, Italy, Normandy ,and Holland.  Electronic Arts has attempted to bring us a recreation of the infancy of America's paratroopers in Medal of Honor: Airborne.  However, much like those first paratroopers, it seems to have missed the target zone in a few spots.

Airborne begins it's campaign with a simple training mission to help players get their legs (and not break them) on parachute jumps  How well you do is tracked and tallied up after three jumps, giving you different sets of colored wings based on your performance.  Then it drops you into the action as PFC Boyd Travers of

 

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the 82nd Airborne, beginning with Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily .  Over the course of six missions (five of which are historical, one which is likely a "what if" scenario that assumed Eisenhower intended to invade Germany in late April of 1945), you'll jump out of perfectly good airplanes and float down into landing zones marked with green smoke, then give it an 

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All-American try to clear out the Nazis and Fascists from your combat zone.

Over the course of the six missions, you'll have the chance to pick up and use various weapons of both Allied and Axis manufacture, from the ubiquitous 1911 Colt .45 and the ever-popular Thompson submachinegun to recoilless rifles and Mauser K98 rifles.  And should the single player campaign be completed, there's always the multiplayer maps, comprised of three mission maps from the game and three retreads from Medal of Honor: Allied Assault.

Visually, Airborne delivers the goods in the form of a modified Unreal 3 engine.  Smoke, fire, explosions, and numerous well detailed textures help bring the player into the game.  Uniforms and weapon models are all given exacting detail, though some nitpicking grognards might find an error or two if they really wanted to look hard enough.  From a technical standpoint and an artistic standpoint, the guys at EA nailed the look of WWII Europe and the men who fought there.  One minor complaint revolves around the model distortion errors involved with the Aegia PhysX engine, which can cause character models of recently killed soldiers to have their limbs wildly distorted if they happen to be falling from a pitched roof and get caught up on an eave or ladder.

If the model and texture artists did their homework, the sound people seemed to have done even better.  You can tell the difference between the sound of a Mauser 98k and the sound of a Garand, right down to the "ping" as the Garand ejects its clip.  Voice actors sound not only appropriately excited, or wounded, or surprised based on the events of the game, but they do so in the right languages as well.  And composer Michael Giacchino deserves major kudos for delivering an excellent soundtrack (his fifth for the Medal of Honor series) that strikes the right moods at the right times.  Both music and sound effects were still ringing in my ears long after I'd walked away and tried to go to sleep.  They're just that damned good.

So if it looks good and it sounds good, does it play good?  It is there that Airborne, a game that has gone to such exceeding lengths for historical accuracy in its look and its sounds, snarls a few of its drogue lines.  By and large, these problems are sins of omission.

Each mission in the campaign is graded by receiving a number of stars in a range from one to five, five obviously being the best.  The problem is that there's no sense of how well you're doing.  I would think that not getting killed in the course of a mission would certainly count towards that five star rating, but as it turns out, the mission I ended up killed on the most got me the five star rating whereas the one which didn't get me killed only earned me a three star rating.  There are a few spots on maps where a player can get stuck, usually behind some form of cover, unable to move, unable to jump, unable to do anything but reload from the last checkpoint and try again.

The game can be finished in as little as 12 hours, assuming you're not trying to earn all the awards in the game such as earning a five star rating in all missions on the Casual setting.

This leads me into my biggest gripe about Airborne: the multiplayer.  Disregarding the fact that EA somehow failed to convince major game hosting services to host Airborne, the multiplayer itself isn't too bad on the surface.  But it quickly becomes obvious that a mechanic from the single player game is tied into the multiplayer game, with serious balancing issues because of it.  The single player campaign allows you to gain experience with the various weapons, earning increasing ranks of marksmanship proficiency medals the more accurate and the more often you use a weapon.  Each medal confers some sort of benefit, such as improved accuracy, greater magazine capacity, or faster reloading times.  These upgrades transfer over into the multiplayer maps.  Thus, somebody who only plays multiplayer will either have to live with the weaker less accurate weapons or he'll be forced to play the single player game (at least a couple of times, it's not that easy to fully upgrade a weapon).  Creating a level grind in a shooter kills the fun.

Finally, another sin of omission is related to the length of the single player campaign.  EA obvious did their homework and put in all manner of little touches, even working in historical details (such as the British Royal Navy mistakenly firing on American planes and gliders during Operation Husky) to help set the mood of the missions.  Yet the missions themselves represent only a small slice of the larger operation.    Why not give the player the option moving along the roads with Patton to help capture Palermo in Sicily ?  Or play a bit of "what if" by running the player down the length of "Hell's Highway" and try to help Montgomery from blowing Market Garden by taking that last bridge? Break each operation down into smaller discreet missions, instead of having one mission to cover the entire operation.  Yes, it would have been a longer game, but a far richer one as well.

All in all, Medal of Honor: Airborne brings a sense of authenticity and realism with a tinge of the arcade to a simulation of a daring period in American military history.  Even if it feels like Airborne shot itself in the foot with some poor choices.  No Purple Heart for this one.

- Axel Cushing

(October 29, 2007)

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