Medal of Honor Rising Sun

"Too little, too late."

Despite what its title may lead you to believe, Medal of Honor: Rising Sun is not a rebirth for the series. It feels like it fell out of a time warp from several years ago. Let's investigate this dimensional anomaly, though, shall we?

Story
Rising Sun puts you in the boots of one Joeseph Griffin, a Corporal in the Marines during World War II. Joe is thrust into the Pacific theater, and battles at Pearl Harbor and the Philippines, among other locations.

Hilarity ensues, of course.

Graphics
Oof. Here's where we start going downhill, folks. Character models are bland looking (and almost identical to the previous game in the series, Allied Assault), and while early levels look nice, and the game has pretty lighting effects in areas, levels in swamps and jungles are laughable most of the time, and the game is pretty blurry.

Controls
Controls here are pretty bad. To be fair, though, this is mostly due to the GameCube controller, and its... odd layout. It really doesn't work here.

Gameplay
Rising Sun's gameplay is downright archaic. There are two real issues, here.

One: AI. The game's Artificial Intelligence is downright laughable. Your allies will run around in little circles, and your enemies will stand and stare at you while you shoot them with a shotgun. They also like to forget about the nasty-looking bayonets on the tips of their rifles while you leap around them in great bounds and remove their limbs with your teeth. Other times, they remember their bayonets, and run at you with weapon raised for about fifteen miles in a straight line. During stealth missions, shooting enemies in the face in certain areas will leave other guards unaware of your presence, but in other areas shooting an enemy in the back with a silenced pistol will alert every last enemy in the stage to start shooting at you.

Really, the AI is unforgivable in a big-budget game like this.

Two: Level design is bad. Levels in the jungle are confusing. You will travel across miles and miles of jungle that manage to be confusingly difficult to navigate despite being totally linear. There are little to no opportunities to use such maneuvers like ''flanking'' or ''stealth''. I suppose such things are beyond the capabilities of the current generation of hardware.

The game also stubbornly refuses to evolve in the sense that you are still basically one man against, like, a thousand Japanese soldiers. You never ever work with a squad. You usually work with one person who will get stuck in walls, miss soldiers at point-blank range, and never ever die no matter how many hits they take.

Conclusion
Medal of Honor: Rising Sun is a disappointment. It is a game that is obstinate in its flaws and unchanged, despite what series fans called for, in gameplay.

Indeed, this would have been acceptable back when Medal of Honor: Allied Assault came out.

It isn't now.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 11/16/03