Missing in Action…
It’s no secret that the Medal of Honor franchise has gone through some bad spells over the years, especially with Call of Duty and Battlefield surpassing it in every conceivable way, and yet I do feel sorry for the series that I once used to love. It tried last year to leave WWII behind forever and head to a more realistic, gritty shooter set in Afghanistan and sadly it was met with mixed responses from critics but showed promise, unfortunately the same cannot be said for the sequel…
The story is a convoluted mess that doesn’t really make you want to go fighting, even if some of the elements are from real soldiers, it comes across as unconvincing and the melodrama of the pre-rendered cutscenes with one soldier and his wife and kid are dreadful to say the least. The campaign itself is only a couple of hours long and after completing it, there’s little reason to return to the battlefield.
The campaign is pretty awful to be honest, it feels like a “by-the-numbers” type where each shootout feels the same as the previous one, I got my first suspicions that the campaign wasn’t up to much when I popped in Disc 1 of the game only to find the multiplayer available…that’s right, the single player is on the second disc! I’ve never heard of anything so insane in all my years of gaming, the game also insists you install the game for higher resolution textures, if you don’t then basic things like posters and boxes tend to look like something from the PS2 era, so make sure you have over 1GB on your HDD.
As a shooter, Warfighter doesn’t do anything wrong. It handles well, but it obviously borrows heavily from the COD setup of control. AI is a mess though, your teammates won’t do a lot to help you and pretty much run off to do their own thing, while enemy AI isn’t that smart either. The real focus of Warfighter seems to be the multiplayer, which is probably why it’s on Disc 1.It has some nice ideas, but ultimately they’ve been done before and better than what is on offer here.
The visuals are pretty lackluster, even with the higher texture install. Facial models look pretty awful, while the locations boil down from nice to average, but never amazing. Voice-acting is a mixed bag, while the music is forgettable.
The Verdict
Medal of Honor: Warfighter fails to surpass the competition with a dull campaign, forgettable story and a simplistic multiplayer. It’s not the worst shooter out there, it does a lot of things right…it’s just that it’s been done better and sadly, Warfighter isn’t memorable.
