Medal of Honor Airborne

First things first, it's a Medal of Honor game. It's spelt wrong, it's probably historically incorrect and the Nazi's only ever have one thing say ; "Ich Habe!". That pretty much sums up the whole series, and Airborne is no exception. Graphically, it's not too bad. It's built on the UT3 engine, unsurprisingly, which gives it that sort of...shiny-but-in-the-wrong-place look. For some reason anything that has highlights will look completely wrong.

Putting that aside, however, Airborne did surprise me a little. The first mission is pretty straight forward. You land in a small Italian town and you kill a load of Nazi's until you win. There is only ever two types of objective, the first is where you blow stuff up, and the second is where you kill Nazi's and then blow stuff up. All in all, pretty simple gameplay. The storyline is your usual Medal of Honor thing. You follow a 'historic' campaign where you blow things up in the hope that you start feeling all patriotic and anti-German again. I swear the US government just forced EA to keep making these games so that they can convert those filthy "Nazi-Lovin' Bastards!" into outstanding citizens. Or maybe people just think its fun to kill Nazi's...

By far the best part of the whole game, after running through a little Italian town, Nijmegen and reliving Operation Varsity , is right at the end where you single handedly blown up the 'Flak Tower'. At each level a new opposing Nazi AI is offered to you as sacrifice, each with his own gun and one liner. Instead of having a mix in each level, EA has opted for a clone army to descend upon you. At the end it just gets silly when you're trampled on by a shit load of elite Nazi's with massive machine guns that chop you to bits. I must admit though, hiding around the corner and killing the lot of them got my heart pumping for a little bit.

There are other perks to game that make it different to most WWII games. Firstly, of course, is the whole jumping out of a plane thing. In a couple of the missions it will go through a whole rigmarole of killing off a few of your buddies and in the last mission the whole plane just explodes. Secondly, whenever you die, you get the jump out of a plane again. This means that you can start the mission in any place that you want. It makes things a little bit more interesting, and according to EA, more difficult for the AI. I just think that's their excuse for coding it in badly. As far as I can see, the AI for MoH Airborne is just as shit as the original.

That said, the game doesn't exactly have a lot of longevity as a single player game. Gone are the days when games like Halo or Fable were released, where you could play for hours everyday and still not get any closer to the absolutely epic ending. Considering that games cost millions to make, you would expect more than a couple of hours of interesting and original game play. So when you buy this from your local shop, don't expect a game that will keep you interested for more than a week.

Final Thought Byte : It's not a bad game, per se, just a bit unoriginal. If you like shooting Nazi's, then you might as well buy it. It wont make you go 'ZOMG WOW!', but it will fill your Nazi killing desires.

Tags : EA, Medal of Honor : Airborne, Nazi's