 |
While Electronic Arts’ franchise pre-dates “Call of Duty,” it doesn’t seem to even come close to the quality of its younger competitor anymore. “Medal of Honor Warfighter” tells you exactly what kind of game it is when you open the box and you find that the multiplayer disc is on top and the single player campaign disc is on the bottom.
Basically, that says the developers put very little work into the single-player campaign, and the multiplayer is where the game shines. Writing that statement makes my soul ache because, goodness gracious, the multiplayer is not well put together. I’ll talk about that first since that’s what EA wants you to focus on first when you buy the game.
The main menu for multiplayer? Awful, confusing, cluttered with information and downright annoying. I can’t even begin to go into detail because, honestly, I played several hours of it and didn’t even venture past just finding the Team Deathmatch option and jumping into it.
A player has a team of about five or six classes to choose from, each from a different country. The more point and kills you rack up as a class, the more you can unlock other countries and weapons. This is kind of silly since none of the countries have any sort of advantage over each other and the weapons can all be altered and customized, but none of them have more firepower than another.
This doesn’t make a whole lot of sense since sometimes it’ll feel like an opponent’s gun will just utterly destroy you before you even get close to killing them. I’ve unloaded entire clipsinto people and they haven’t died only to find myself shot twice at full-health and get killed.
None of this is made up for by the terrible maps, the often useless streak-perks such as mortar barrages or helicopter spawns and the utterly baffling discrepancy of the graphics from multiplayer and single player. Honestly, the textures are always behind when loading and it looks like an entirely different game at times when you play online rather than offline.
 |
| Yes, there is environmental destruction and sometimes it actually helps. |
The only redeeming quality of multiplayer is the fireteam system. The game pairs you up with a partner on your team so that there are four teams of two, and by sticking with that individual you can get extra points from their kills and success and vice versa.
It’s a neat little idea about making you care about what happens to your team and working together. Honestly, it reminded me a little of “Ghost Recon: Future Soldier,” just not well done.
A friend and I played together and the saddest thing we found was that if we stayed in a single building on a couple of the maps, we could actually cover each other and camp the entire match, racking up enough points to almost be the best team for the whole game.
He said, and I quote, “This game makes me so depressed I want to just finish this can of Pringles while we play.” That about sums up multiplayer: a depressed person sitting in the dark playing “Warfighter” and eating and entire can of Pringles.
Multiplayer in a nutshell: the graphics are not as good as single player, the modes are not that enjoyable, the weapons and classes really don’t make a difference, the streak perks don’t make that much of a difference and are useless on certain maps, the maps are poorly constructed and frustrating, and none of it is made up for by the fireteam system that is only just slightly rewarding.
And now we move to single player. What’s to say about this other than it tries too hard to be a “Call of Duty” or the “Battlefield 3”-style campaign and it obviously isn’t.
The prologue mission is eerily like the ending scene in the recently made “A-Team” movie. There’s another mission that is eerily similar in beginning objectives to the gulag mission in “Modern Warfare 2” and I’ll be damned if that is the best of all the shooting missions.
I’m going to be honest here and say that the two driving missions, a chase sequence and an escape one, are the best missions in the game. Let me repeat that. TWO DRIVING MISSIONS ARE THE BEST MISSIONS IN A FIRST-PERSON-SHOOTER GAME.
Either they’re the best because they’re first person too and you really feel the urgency in each scene by looking through the car as you would normally, or just by the fact that they’re structured very well and control excellently.
 |
| Lookout! It's a bad copy of another game! Oh wait, it's us. |
Other than that, the sound design is superb and the door-breaching is kind of fun, but when that’s your main check-out-how-awesome-this-game-mechanic-is thing, you’re in trouble. Especially when one of your missions is literally to fire a single shot at someone. I kid you not, the mission is literally to shoot one person and it takes about five minutes.
Also, the cutscenes are…iffy. The character models are not pretty to look at and I really don’t care about any of them, not even the main soldier characters. I’m also confused about the man who is actually structuring all of the missions himself because he’s just some guy in a room with a laptop and computer screens. Is there no structure to the army anymore or can any man with a network of intelligence agents just send special forces troops anywhere in the world?
At first, I wanted to give the game a 7 because, frankly, it is a game and it does run. However, I can’t in good conscience give it anything above a 6. Maybe a 5.5 out of 10. It’s just honestly not that good. I felt bad for spending money on it. I really did. This game is definitely something not to go out and buy right away. Wait for it to go down to $30 or something and then give it about an hour and a half’s worth of thought before you go into the local game store. And ask the clerk’s opinion as well.
