Medal of Honor Allied Assault: Spearhead Preview

While development on the recently announced expansion pack to Medal of Honor: Allied Assault is still a few months away from completion, Electronic Arts did manage to complete one aspect of the game's production not too long ago: deciding on a name. After an initial back and forth between titles like "Team Assault" and "Reload," Electronic Arts and developer EALA finally settled on Medal of Honor Allied Assault: Spearhead. Like most expansion packs, Spearhead will make a number of additions to Allied Assault's original gameplay, not the least of which are new multiplayer maps, a new multiplayer mode, several new weapons, and a whole new mini single-player campaign that will have you fighting Germans on their own doorstep. For those who haven't had the pleasure, the original Medal of Honor: Allied Assault put you in the shoes of one Lt. Mike Powel, an OSS agent tasked with infiltrating Nazi positions in North Africa and Europe, extracting vital military secrets, and wreaking mass havoc on the Axis powers in general. The game was superbly executed, thanks to its gorgeous graphics, amazing sound effects, and gameplay inspired by the likes of Saving Private Ryan. We recently had the chance to play an early build of Spearhead, and it's clear that this forthcoming expansion pack is striving to offer the same level of excitement and fevered combat that its predecessor did earlier this year.

In fact, you'll find yourself in a pitched battle immediately upon firing up Spearhead. Interestingly, you won't play the role of Lt. Powell in the add-on. Instead, your character is a Sergeant Jack Barnes, a US Army Ranger who's sent into Normandy the night before the infamous D-Day invasion. Much like Allied Assault, Spearhead opens with an in-game cutscene that is depicted from your perspective. Though, instead of landing on the beach, you'll be inserted into France from 3,000 feet. You'll start Spearhead aboard a C-47 Gooney as part of a squad of airborne infantry. As you approach your jump window, a red bulb above the lone door on the C-47 will flicker on, and one of the airplane's crew chiefs will signal your squad to rise. You'll notice each soldier checking the chute and pack of the person in front of him, and then the squad takes turns sounding off their "OKs." A few seconds later, the red light is replaced with a green one, and the soldiers aboard the C-47 dive out of a perfectly good airplane for the short parachute ride down to French soil.

While parts of Allied Assault were directly inspired by Saving Private Ryan, this sequence in Spearhead is an obvious homage to the second episode of HBO's World War II miniseries Band of Brothers. As you float down to the ground, you'll immediately take note of hundreds of other parachutes, dozens of other C-47 planes, and streaks of triple-A fire lighting up the night sky. As you make your descent, you'll be witness to disturbing scenes like a hapless soldier free-falling toward the ground without a chute and a midair collision between two C-47s. The Omaha Beach level was a particularly nerve-racking and memorable experience in the original Medal of Honor, and Spearhead's opening moment is a worthy follow-up.

In cruel irony (considering your character's name), you'll crash through the roof of a barn, and you'll have to manually unlatch your chute straps before a squad of Germans storm through the structure. Your primary objective is to meet up with your company, though you'll find this to be an impossible task. The hedgerows of Northern France are crawling with German infantry and the occasional tank. To dispatch any armor that you might come across, Spearhead's levels have strategically placed heavy gun emplacements that you can also use to mow down wave after wave of onrushing soldiers.

Other Additions

As it is, you'll never find your original squadmates during this sequence of events, but before the first mission is over, you will run into a small squad of British commandos. Squad combat plays an important role in Spearhead, and you'll find that you're rarely ever doing battle on your own, as you sometimes did in Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. As you work your way through the rest of the expansion pack's single-player campaign, you'll eventually hook up with a regiment of US soldiers and a company of Russian infantry. Spearhead's single-player campaign is composed of nine individual missions, three for each of the three main areas of conflict that the game portrays: Normandy, Arnhem, and Berlin. You'll wage war alongside British paratroopers in Normandy, you'll withstand German artillery with your American compatriots in the snowy woods of Ardennes, and you'll lay siege on Berlin with the Russians.

The Germans in Spearhead are every bit as vicious as they were in Allied Assault, though no longer to the point of driving you to sheer frustration. Many Allied Assault veterans still look back upon the Snipertown level as being one of the few blights on an otherwise impeccable game. The AI in Spearhead will no longer seem like it's cheating, thanks to revisions that include a shorter line of sight and a slight decrease in the reaction times of enemies. And while you won't have to deal with a seemingly unfair enemy advantage in Spearhead, you will have to contend with overwhelming odds. To do so, the expansion pack will give you all the original weapons from Allied Assault and then some. Complementing the already broad arsenal in Spearhead will be British weapons like the Enfield Mark 1 and the Sten submachine gun, and Soviet guns like the Russian PPSh-41. Spearhead also includes M-18 smoke grenades that can be used as markers for your squadmates or to provide cover across open areas. Additionally, you'll find numerous MG-42 gun emplacements throughout the game, and like in Allied Assault, some missions will even require that you jump into a tank and do battle with some serious hardware. This aspect of combat, too, is different than it is in Allied Assault. Unlike in the original game's Tiger tank, you'll be able to switch between the main cannon and a chaingun while piloting Spearhead's TU-34. What's more, you'll be able to retain full control over the tank while manning its secondary weapon. This might not exactly be realistic, but it sure is fun.

You can also expect to find numerous additions to Allied Assault's multiplayer component in Spearhead. Not only will the add-on have about 10 new maps for play with the standard deathmatch, team deathmatch, and objective-based gameplay modes, but Spearhead will also have an entirely new multiplayer mode altogether. Called tug of war, this mode is basically a series of objective-based missions in which two teams need to capture and hold or protect five specific areas on the map in order to win the match. There are four such maps in Spearhead in all. The first one is set in a destroyed village in a forest near Ardennes, and the Allied team is tasked with protecting two trucks, keeping the main gate to the town open, controlling the Flak-88 in the town square, shutting down the generator in the Axis bunker, and destroying the MG-42 atop that same Axis fortification. Just as Spearhead's single-player campaign puts the focus on squad combat, so its tug of war multiplayer mode stresses the importance of teamwork. It's very easy to overrun one or two areas of the map, but accomplishing all five objectives at once is a daunting task that's reserved for teams that can coordinate and launch a series of simultaneous attacks while still preventing the other side from achieving its goals.

Fans of Allied Assault should appreciate everything that's packed into Spearhead, and the squad-based combat is a nice touch for anyone who didn't get a chance to play Medal of Honor Frontline for the PlayStation 2. With its additions to Allied Assault's arsenal, its new multiplayer maps, and its nine single-player missions, Medal of Honor Allied Assault: Spearhead shouldn't be missed by fans of this truly venerable series. Spearhead will be available in mid-November.