Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (MoH:AA) was a game that really looked too good to be true from its advance footage. I have to say after finishing it, though, that it actually lives up to that hype. It has a couple of flaws, I think, but MoH:AA has finally done what no other game since Half-Life has done; i.e., take the crown as best FPS game. MOH:AA offers a stunning synergy of elements that are both designed and implemented so well as to suck the player into the game in a way that few games do. As I said, it does have some flaws, but they are pretty minor in the grand scheme.
The game looks great, period. Being released so close to Return to Castle Wolfenstein (RtCW), comparisons between the two are inevitable. Visually, RtCW goes for realism while MoH:AA goes for its own distinctive style. While the graphical realism of RtCW is appealing, I actually prefer the visual approach of MoH:AA because it's more consistent overall. What I mean is that while RtCW looks quite realistic, this generates a certain expectation for the gameplay, namely, that it play realistically. RtCW's gameplay, of course, is not at all realistic, requiring one to pump certain German heads full of a half-dozen bullets (or more) before they go down, while a single knife-in-the-back will strangely suffice. Go figure. In contrast, MoH:AA doesn't tie itself to any such approach and thereby gains some flexibility. Ironically enough, the gameplay in MoH:AA is actually more realistic than RtCW insofar as (1) pretty much all the bad guys die with a single headshot, (2) there are no "fantastic" elements (e.g., zombies, etc.), (3) one can't sprint at super-duper-ridiculous speed and so forth.
My one big complaint with the visuals is that the developer chose to elide blood entirely. I positively despise this kind of stupid and inconsistent politically correct approach. It doesn't even accomplish what it sets out to do; i.e., it doesn't actually help shield young folk for two reasons. First, if the point is to "protect" youth from such awful, violent scenes, then it's simply inconsistent. The game already features explosions, in which multiple bodies are tossed to and fro, death by the bucketful and so forth. If such depictions of violence really damage young minds (an arguably false claim, I think), then it isn't clear how the mere omission of blood from the mayhem helps.
Second, it mars the connection between what is being depicted and reality. It reminds me of the old Saturday-morning G.I. Joe show in which thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of rounds are fired every week without a single character ever getting hit. It seems to me that the very best favor one can do for youth is to present them with the truth. The facts of the matter are that war is an ugly business for good reason. When people are shot, they bleed and die. Adding gore to the game adds to the horror of the prospects for war as a whole and does far more, in my estimation, toward the development of tender young souls. It also adds in a very powerful yet subtle way to the overall visual theme of a game. MoH:AA's lack is palpable on this point, and I hope it will be addressed somehow by the developer or the community.
The aural elements of MoH:AA are simply outstanding. I cannot praise this game highly enough in this department. The music is utterly perfect, combining a certain honorable and distinctly American beauty with the sad refrains appropriate to the situations at hand. The ambient audio is fabulous, the guards actually speak German as they should—sorry, RtCW—and best of all the weapons are simply tremendous. I'm not sure quite how they've done it, but even the basic crack of the pistol has utterly failed to bore me as is so often the case with other games. All of the sound effects are crisp, clean and perfectly executed. If this game doesn't win an award for its audio, it will be a crime.
My only complaint against the interface is that it reminds me of the annoyances of console games. That is, there is no clear menu structure. One must poke around an admittedly pleasant and thematically consistent room for all of the "hot spots". If I wanted to play an adventure game, folks, I would have bought one. Still, this is a minor annoyance. Once one gets into the game itself, the interface works just fine. I particularly like the way one's special items appear in the upper-right corner of the display, and the compass' way of showing the next task's direction and relative distance is as well done (and appropriately themed) as I've seen to date in any such game.
MoH:AA's game mechanics are great. I don't know why, but this is one of the only games I've ever played that actually gets ladders perfect. One presses the use key and climbs aboard. That's how it should work. No more falling off the roof, struggling to get the ladder to "catch" and so forth. It's also worth mentioning that I can't somehow fire off my weapon while climbing ladders, a small but important concession to reality in my estimation. Running seems very realistic (i.e., slow) as do all the other elements. I particularly hate it when a game tries to force me to stand still to fire accurately, and MoH:AA has a good balance along those lines. It actually seems to reward careful thinking and movement without punishing players needlessly for having the gall to try to move and lay down suppressing fire. Oh, and there's no ridiculous bunny-hopping as in Counterstrike—woohoo! In short, things just work and feel right.
The view-jerks-when-shot feature is particularly praiseworthy (with one exception), as it really motivates one to seek cover. In a game like Red Faction, for example, I can usually go tearing into any room at full speed, running about and circle strafing with near impunity. That's fun, of course, but it would be a real let-down in a game as otherwise carefully themed as MoH:AA. This lone component of the overall game mechanics really adds to the feel of being in the infantry. Sure, it's unrealistic that you don't die when you get shot in the face by the enemy, but it is a game, after all, and as such it must be entertaining. This feature does have one major drawback, however, and I'll get to that shortly.
Bits of the story are ripped straight from history for the most part, so how can I possibly complain? Because of the great fidelity with which the game handles its subject matter, the player is truly drawn into the enormity of the events. I really couldn't help being filled with awe at the now-famous D-Day invasion mission. To watch all those "men" dying, striving to overcome their fears, etc. all for God and country was truly humbling. The generation that won WWII is surely not the greatest generation in history, I think, but they did rise to a staggering challenge, and I'm happy to see that the game surely impresses that upon the mind of the player. The missions are tied together pretty nicely by the WWII story-arc, and the player is caught up in so many big events that if you're unhappy with the story... well... tough.
The game's content is almost uniformly wonderful. The weapons are a wonderful set of tools, the environments are some of the most gripping I've ever seen, the missions are interesting, scale nicely (i.e., they get tougher at a gradual pace with one notable exception), and are a blast to complete, etc. The overall design philosophy of this game should really settle an argument over whether it's important to let the player do things in a free-form fashion or whether it's alright to hold his hand. Games like Deus Ex (DE) take the former route, whereas MoH:AA takes the latter. The answer is simple: they both have their place.
In DE, one has but a few, scripted scenes by comparison. There is, of course, an interesting story in the background, but DE is ultimately a game about letting the player make interesting choices in order to accomplish certain goals, and therein lies the fun. That is, a big part of the fun of DE is the making of those choices. MoH:AA, on the other hand, holds the player's hand almost completely. The player moves from one very carefully controlled and scripted encounter to the next, and that too is fun. The execution of MoH:AA is so good that one doesn't mind; i.e., being led from one wonderful situation to the next is a blast, and frankly it's more liberating than a game like DE wherein poor choices regarding the lines along which one's character develops can prove nearly fatal later in the game.
One glaring exception where the game's overall fun-factor is concerned is the sniper level. I honestly don't know what the developers were thinking. To avoid spoiling the story, let me say simply that there is one level wherein one must get through a largely destroyed town in which there are quite a few crack snipers gunning for the player. This is one case where the game mechanics break down, I think, because the view-jerks-when-shot feature almost guarantees you'll never see the flash of the enemy fire. It's one thing, as a player, to walk out into the open and take a bullet, discovering in the process where the unexpected enemy lies. It's another thing to walk out into the open and take a bullet, and be no closer to dealing with the enemy. The former is a good "punishment" for forgetting appropriate tactics, whereas the latter is pure frustration.
When I played that level, I finished off a couple of the bad guys pretty quickly and then got stuck, and I mean stuck. As soon as I turned a corner, BAM! I'm hit. BAM! I'm hit again. BAM! I'm hit again. All the while I'm trying desperately just to see the sniper. Despite trying variations on this theme, scanning the opposing houses carefully through the scope from a position of relative safety and so forth, I failed to find the sniper. After 17 reloads, I didn't want to waste any more time on it, so I scanned the web and found some cheats. Once god-mode was enabled, I walked forward and stood out in the open, thinking I would eventually see the sniper. I didn't. In fact, I never found that sniper from that vantage point. As it turns out, he was about 150 - 200 yards away on the top of a roof, which was obscured by the trees, and only his head and the very tip of his gun were even visible. My only real option, I suspect, was to run past him somehow and deal with him later, but every time I tried to do that, I came under fire from other snipers and died before I could get to safety.
There is no way I would ever have made it through that level without using the god-mode cheat to find out where the snipers were. There was too little health and too little possibility of finding the sniper until you're already dead. It reminds me of a certain style of Dungeons & Dragons play in which the DM places impossible-to-detect-and/or-survive traps because... well... he can. For the player, it's just not fun. In contrast, the very next portion of that mission did it the right way; i.e., there were still a lot of really tough snipers, but the player had a medic with him. That allows the player the grace to get nailed from time to time without making the mission thoroughly ridiculous.
This leaves me only two complaints with the game content. First, there's too little of it! I realize I'm a hard-core gamer, so I expect to get through things pretty quickly. But when I plunk down $40+ for a game (thank God for that 20%-off coupon in the latest issue of PC Gamer), I expect more than a few hours of play. I realize that I can always play the multi-player portion of the game to my heart's content, but at its core MoH:AA is clearly a single-player experience. As such, it's from that aspect that I expect to find the real "meat" of the game. I was able to finish it completely in two days. Admittedly, I did play something like five hours straight during the first night I had it, but that left only an hour or two of play for the rest of it. It was really intense, no doubt, but I can't help feeling like there should be more to it for that kind of cash (it's being sold for $54.99 at most local shops right now).
Second, when the game ends, it just ends. That's it. I realize that MoH:AA differs from other FPS games in that there is no end-boss to kill, there is no one-guy-saves-the-whole-world plot and so forth. But the very opening cinematic suggests that the player will ultimately be rewarded with something. Instead, at the end of the game, you're just done. It leaves the prospects for a sequel wide-open, of course, but at the end of a game, I guess I expect something to give me a sense of closure (e.g., RtCW), or at least deliberately lead me onto the path for a sequel (e.g., DOOM). MoH:AA stumbles at this point, as I think the developers should have given the player something for beating it. Maybe they figured it was just too short to merit any such reward, but that's offering a problem as the excuse for another problem (grin).
The multi-player aspect of MoH:AA is really quite good. I don't like the choice of Counterstrike-style rounds as opposed to RtCW-style rounds (i.e., in the former you're dead until the next round whereas in the latter you respawn after an interval), but it's still quite gripping even with these in effect. If anything, I find it far more interesting than Counterstrike (CS) because it doesn't suffer from the ridiculous accuracy/damage model problems with that game. The straight-up deathmatch is a great deal of fun on many of the maps, and the objective-based maps, while more difficult to play, are quite well done.
I think where MoH:AA really shines as a multi-player game is in its weapon balancing. I played for some time with each of the various weapons available, and I was quite surprised to find them all useful. Yes, the "rocket launcher" is definitely the most powerful, but its long reloading time really handicaps it to the point whereat I was easily wasting folks carrying it with the "lowly" shotgun. The only complaint I would lodge against the weapons would be that the submachine gun seems too powerful compared to the machinegun. Or to put it differently, there seems little incentive for using the latter rather than the former. The machinegun's rate of fire is slower, and it doesn't seem to kill more quickly enough than the submachinegun to justify its selection. Still, I used it simply because I liked the sound (grin).
My only complaint against the multi-player game is similar to one of my complaints against the multi-player game, namely, that because of the view-jerks-when-shot feature, it's all too easy for a lone sniper to dominate a game. While playing the storm-the-beach map as the Axis, for example, I kept getting nailed by one enemy sniper whom I simply could not find. As is typical of my luck, I spawned and died within a second or two. I then spawned in the very same spot and was gunned down instantly by the same sniper. I then spawned in a different spot and, while turning around trying to get my bearings took yet another bullet to the head from—yes, you guessed it—the same sniper. And I wasn't the only one, either. I kept seeing teammate after teammate put down by this same sniper because none of us could tell where he was. As I mentioned before, with the view jerking it's nearly impossible to see the flash of the bullet. The compass does show an arc within which one can find the enemy, of course, but the arc is so wide as to be mostly useless with the distances involved.
If you haven't figured it out yet, then let me state it explicitly: go buy MoH:AA and play it. Any FPS gamer will be happy with this one, I think, except for the length and the ending. Half-life (HL) is a better investment, of course, in terms of bang-for-the-buck, but I believe MoH:AA has measurably surpassed HL in the fun department, and as a software achievement it's surely surpassed its competition by a measurable degree. It's sort of like playing a movie, which I know Max Payne was supposed to do but didn't do this well. As I've complained already, MoH:AA is too short, but I know this much: I'll be playing through it completely at least a couple more times. It's that good. It sucked me in hard right from the outset and showed me things no other game has done. To say it's highly recommended is an understatement.
01/26/2002