Medal of Honor

"SHOOT A GUY, RELOAD, WALK FORWARD, REPEAT"

Level Design -

If you play just one mission in your life, you'll like the level designs. But after repeated play you'll fall asleep from boredom. Claustrophobics will have panic attacks as the entire game is played in tiny hallways and rooms and inbetween hedgerows in destroyed French towns. You won't see anything but walls and more walls as you navigate endless corridors while shooting so called Nazi's.

Character Design -

You're fighting Nazi's, but you won't really care. There are like 20 different types of enemies, but you won't be able to tell them apart except that they wear different colored shirts. Real Nazi's were precise and calculated. They always walked in formation, always looked confident, and would go so far as to straighten picture frames in houses they were searching. But the Nazi's in Medal of Honor act retarded. They resemble the soldier's in a Rambo movie more than an elite fighting unit which almost took over the world. I'm not a Neo-Nazi or anything but this game makes the Nazi's look like pushovers instead of what they really were, tough resilient killers. Laughably bad character design is this games weak point.

Mission Design -

Walk around and kill a whole bunch of guys, then you can look for mission objectives without interfence. Admittedly, you'll love the action and the chance to overtake Hitler yourself, but when it comes right down to it, the missions are repetative find something and blow something up while killing guys.

Weapon Design -

Remember Contra for Nintendo about 12 years ago? That game had a laser weapon, a rapid fire weapon, a spreadshot, and a spiraling flame cannon. In a dozen years and 8,000 games later, Medal of Honor manages to have less good weapons than the original Contra. Here's the set-up, you have a gun, a big long gun, a machine gun, and a grenade. That's it. Sure there are different types of machine guns, but who cares? There are different types of clouds in the sky, but who notices? A cloud is a cloud and a gun is a gun. They could have included a knife, a rope, handcuffs, anything and it would have been better than shooting gun after gun all day long.

Animations -

Wow! From the mission briefings to the Nazi's kicking away grenades or falling out of tree lifts, the animations are very good. This is the one area that doesn't look outdated, and seeing a bad guy crawling on the ground in agony is awesome. I also love the guys who die and shoot while falling down.

Realism -

None. You get stuck on walls and the screen will shudder crazily. You climb ladders without putting away your gun. You can get shot up to 50 times in a level and still finish with full life. You can walk backwards faster than a Nazi can run forwards. Machine Gun turrets have unlimited bullets that manifest from nowhere. Stuff that blows up disappears and lifewise do the enemies when they die. Basically, the same flaws that exist in all first person shooters are exemplified in this game as if they are features and not problems. Like the hedgerows you walk through are just flat pictures, but instead of clevering disquising this fact, they just go with it like it's normal looking.

The GOLDENEYE Comparison -

Goldeneye was made before Banjo-Kazooie to give you an idea of how long ago that was. Even though Goldeneye is old, it's still way way way way better than Medal of Honor. Goldeneye had the awesome sniping ability, the diverse missions and the pretty graphics. Medal of Honor doesn't have any of these things. So please ignore it when the other reviewer's say things about the two games being alike in quality.

Sound and Effects -

Nice music with tension packed sound effects, like footsteps around the corner or German officers shouting orders out of your view. But all the sound in the world doesn't save a game that isn't fun to play........So is Medal of Honor fun at all? Well........

Fun Factor/Replayability -

Is Medal of Honor fun or not? Not. There are only three reasons to play through the game. One is to beat it. Two is to try to get all of the medals of honor. Three is because you bought it and you want to get your money's worth. But it's not fun. You'll cringe when the alarm keeps wailing and wailing and no troops show up anyway, so there is no need for them to have an alarm. You'll get tired of walking around a corner and getting shot in the back because you chose to turn the wrong way. At the end of a level, after killing guys and searching through corridors for twenty minutes, you'll curse when you get a 2 star rating, because then you have to go back and play through again, this time ferreting out the one or two guards you forgot to kill in order to get a 3 star rating and a medal. And trust me, once you play through a level, you never want to play through again.......ever.

Other Stuff -

The ranking is odd. If you record 20 headshot, 12 left arm shots and 8 right arm shots, you get the rank of armslinger, even though you had more head hits than anything else. Multiplayer mode is not very well done. Playing it and enjoying it is proof that you are insane. So just don't even go into the menu, instead just play Goldeneye's multiplayer or some other game that does multi-player justice.

OVERALL - 5

There is a lot of depth. Goldeneye takes about 45 minutes to beat, Metal Gear Solid takes about 2 hours and 15 minutes and Resident Evil 3 takes about 2 hours and 30 minutes. These are all good games and are relatively short. Medal of Honor could very well take you more time to beat than those three games combined. The first person shooter usual features are all included and a lot of effects and animations are all new. So this isn't a total bomb of a game, it's just not very exciting or original to play.

Buy or Rent -

If you like first person shooters and want to fight some Nazi's then you'll probably want to buy it, just because there isn't much else to chose from in the world of Playstation.

But if you're like me and only judge a game based on the amount of fun and depth of gameplay it offers, then you won't even want to rent it.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 03/30/00, Updated 03/30/00