Medal of Honor Rising Sun

"Well, not as bad as everyone says... but not great."

STORY : 8/10
Medal of Honor: Rising Sun is a World War II game. In this game, you're a soldier who is fighting against Japanese Soldiers.

Anyway, even though the general places are real life WWII "stories" (Like Pearl Harbor, The Philippines, etc), you can't have a game without actually characters. In-between levels, you can read the soldier's letters from home. In the beginning, he's a random unknown soldier, but his reputation rises, and in the end, the Japanese General goes to far as to hold his Brother (Another
Soldier, too) hostage, on a Ship. You never rescue him, but you don't know if he dies. I know that it's not that important in a WWII game, but I like that the character has a little side story along with the historical story.

GAMEPLAY: 6/10
This is what brings the game down, for me, as well as others, if I've heard right from people I've asked. It's not horrible to play, but it's far from perfect. You know how in most WWII games the designers make it so that when you shoot, the gun goes up, to make it more realistic? Well, they did that in this game, too, but they overdid it. It bumps up too much; it's really hard to get more then one or two shots in before you have to stop shooting to look down again. To solve this problem, start shooting at their feet. But that creates more problems, too, like getting shot in the head if there are a lot of them.

Another thing is that the button layout doesn't make much sense. R1, right shoulder button, whatever, is the standard "shoot" button for pretty much every FPS since Goldeneye. Same with the two stick moving system. But besides that, a few things don't' make sense. For example, ducking is square (on the left), not X (on the bottom). That's not that much, I guess I overexadurated this, but if you're not used to it, it can screw you.

SFX/MUSIC: 7/10
Like most shooting games, this isn't so big on music. There's some dramatic sounding music playing in the background, but besides that, it's mostly gun and explosion noises, which are pretty standard-sounding.

The voices are easy to understand if you're in the right position, which is hard to get in. If you're looking at, like, even a 2 degrees angle away from the person you're speaking too, their voice gets very quiet, which can be annoying, when you're trying to make sure you don't get killed when talking to someone for an objective, which happens often.

GRAPHICS: 7/10
Yeah, they're not so advanced in this game either. Everything seems to be slightly grayer then it should be. The heads are WAY too small for the shoulders, which isn't really annoying, but it's really funny to see.

Overall, I think it's better then everyone says it is, but it's not really that great, either.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 12/09/05