Medal of Honor: European Assault

By Spencer . September 27, 2005 . 2:50am

In the days on the original Playstation the Medal of Honor series was revolutionary. The game threw players in the midst of a war with the backbone of a FPS. After the letdown, which was Medal of Honor Rising Sun, Medal of Honor is back with a WWII theme. European Assault places you in the shoes of Holt, a grunt solider in the middle of hostile Nazi territory. Holt isn’t alone, he’s got three squad members and a bunch of other computer AI allies running on the battlefield too. The whole experience is create the feeling of being in a large scale battle.

Each mission starts out with a specific objective like take out a power plant or escape from an area. On the bottom of the screen there is a compass that shows the general direction towards the main goal. Clear the goal and you win the level, simple enough. There are a bunch of other side missions that are encompassed in the main mission for Holt to take part in. Some of them are clearly spelled out like shooting down an elite solider or capturing a certain spot of land back. While some of the side objectives are given out at the start of the mission, many more of them can only be discovered by exploring the area. Encouraged exploration leads to multiple paths and different gameplay experiences. Completing optional objectives can give gamers a variety of bonuses like medkits to restore health and revives that function as extra lives. Of course not everyone will want to seek out all of the extra missions to get a gold medal and for these gamers they can simply focus on the main mission.

Combat in Medal of Honor is more realistic than say Unreal Tournament or Doom. Holt can’t get hit by a rocket and hope to live. A few well placed shots will force gamers to use a revive. Because of this taking cover is essential. If you stand with your back against the wall or behind a set of crates you’ll be shielded from fire. Pressing the L1 button lets you peek your gun out to fire a couple of shots. There are a bunch of different guns to select from like sniper rifles and machine guns that riddle the screen when fired. There is also the occasional mounted machine gun for heavy duty fire. When you need to really clear the screen you can throw a grenade and take out a couple of troops with a well launched throw. Each kill you get adds points to your adrenaline meter. The adrenaline meter is essentially the equivalent of a bullet time feature. When full you can press up on the D-pad to move into a trance where everything is in slow motion. It’s perfect when you’re preparing to storm an area. Even if you focus on headshots it takes a long time for the adrenaline meter to fill up, so it’s not something you can come to rely on.

Holt does have a squad that is with him, but you don’t have many options on how to control your team. Instead they follow you around like slow firing gun pods. If any team in your squad dies you’ll miss out on getting bonus medkits for the next level. Not a huge penalty, but if you really want to keep them alive you can spend some of the medkits on your squad instead of saving them for yourself.

What’s really missing in Medal of Honor: European Assault is online gameplay. All three systems are missing out on it, which is a pretty big surprise. For all of the work put into the multiplayer mode it’s a bit of a disappointment. If you have a couple of people over you can take on one of the fifteen different maps packaged into the game. There are four different classes to pick from: infantry, sniper, heavy weapons and rifleman. You can switch between these classes at anytime by stepping over an icon to change your class. The different classes fit the basic molds that players are accustomed to. There are a bunch of different gameplay options to pick from too like capture the flag, survival and a standard death match. Some unique options include "Nemesis" where whoever picks up a bazooka becomes the nemesis that everyone tries to kill. Once the nemesis is killed someone else can pick up the bazooka and become the nemesis to rack up points. Face to Face is a pretty cool mode where you and another team are trying to place a bomb in each other’s bases.

One thing that is fairly deceptive about the title is that it isn’t for causal gamers, like the rest of the series. Early on the first set of missions are pretty easy to complete. Once you move outside of Europe the game’s difficulty spikes sharply. A fair amount of players will be frustrated because they have a limited number of revives and medkits, that don’t accumulate level after level. The game isn’t impossible, but the fluctuation in difficulty is a huge surprise.

As a whole Medal of Honor: European Assault surpasses its predecessor Rising Sun. Yet it doesn’t really stand up to be anything strikingly different from any other war game out on the shelf. With fierce evolutions produced by the Call of Duty series Medal of Honor European Assault doesn’t seem as impressive as it could be. Even with a famed script and real locations, the actual gameplay is about the same as any other war game.

Import Friendly? Literacy Level: 0

This review is based on the US version, which was released first.

US Bound?

Already released in the US for all three major consoles. It will be released in Japan for the PS2 and Gamecube in August.

+ Pros: Some new features and gameplay polish make this better than the previous game.

- Cons: What happened to online multiplayer?

Overall: Not revolutionary by any means, but people into war games will like the multi-tiered mission objectives with frantically paced combat.

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