2015 and EA start the year off strong with one of the best shooters we've played in years.
Remember Raiders of the Lost Ark? If you can, try to imagine that Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones wasn't a fancy professor or archeologist, but instead a special infantry soldier serving his army during WWII. Now imagine a game surrounding his various adventures throughout wartime Europe -- an exciting retelling of his missions, retaining that same cinematic feel.
The first mission places you on a rescue mission with a squad of other Allied soldiers.
That description pretty much sums up Medal Of Honor: Allied Assault. Far more than your average shooter, MoH:AA sucks you into its world, complete with more scripted scenes that you can possibly hope to see in one trip through the game. Gamers looking for a "realistic" experience may find the action a bit over-the-top, but like Raiders, it's such a fantastic ride that you'll likely find yourself raving about it long after the credits roll.
Basic Training
Medal Of Honor: Allied Assault is the third in a series of WWII games published by EA Games. The first two (Medal of Honor and MoH: Underground) were developed by Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks Interactive for the Sony PlayStation, continuing the director's fascination with all things WWII. For the series' first foray onto the PC, EA handed over development to 2015, a name gamers may recognize from the excellent Wages of SiN mission pack a few years back.
Like the first two games, Allied Assault is a fairly straightforward first-person shooter - you play Lieutenant Mike Powell, an American soldier working for the Office of Strategic Services in WWII Europe (OK, one mission is in North Africa). The game is spread out over 6 distinct missions (a total of 33 levels), each taking place at a certain time and location starting in late 1942, and ending in early 1945.
Don't you wish you drove up in that tank? Actually, you did.
The missions are fairly varied - some will place you on search-and-rescue operations, some are hit-and-run, and some just require you to escape with your life. One mission in Norway has you sneaking around disguised as a German officer in order to sabotage a submarine; another has you in France stealing a King Tiger tank and raising all sorts of hell with it. To its credit, the game never allows you to get bored for too long; just as you're settling into one type of gameplay, MoH:AA throws something new at you.
Small Consolation
The game's console roots can be seen even before jumping into the game…and that's not necessarily a good thing. The menu interface is laid out in the same graphical style as the PlayStation games; unfortunately, having to navigate with a mouse instead of a gamepad turns what should be a simple scroll through the game options into a side quest from Myst. You need to mouse around each screen a few times to learn where all the hotspots are, and even then, you won't be sure you've found everything. Thankfully, this is the absolute worst thing that can be said about Allied Assault, and it has virtually no effect on gameplay.
As in the PlayStation games, each mission is also introduced by a short briefing setting up your objectives, presented in slideshow format. It may be a little low-tech compared to what we're used to, but certainly in character with the time period. At one point, you'll even meet up with Manon, the lead character from MoH: Underground, but that's pretty much all the crossover you'll find in the game.
Close Combat
To do battle, you're given the usual assortment of weapons -- pistols, machineguns, rifles, grenades and heavy artillery. All are based on real-life counterparts, most needing to be reloaded regularly. You'll often find yourself relying on your Springfield sniper rifle (one series of levels requires it almost exclusively), with your machineguns being the most likely choice for closer combat. Unlike most games, you won't start out with one weapon and end up with 15 by game's end - in fact, you'll rarely carry more than 4 or 5 weapons during the course of any one mission. Once a mission is complete, you'll start the next one with a fresh set.
On the other hand, you'll have a variety of special items at your beck and call at different times throughout the game. Most useful is the compass, displayed in the upper left of the screen. A small arrow in the perimeter of the compass continually points you towards your next objective, and virtually guarantees that you'll never find yourself wondering where you're supposed to be going. In some missions you'll get binoculars and a radio for calling in air strikes, and other levels will require you to find specialty items like a gas mask or ID papers to continue.
Helping add some variety to the game's levels are a number of vehicles you get to control, or in some cases, fight. One mission has you firing at planes from the back of a jeep, while another has you commanding a tank and steamrolling through France. While there isn't a whole lot of flexibility to these levels (you can't just hop in and out of vehicles as you choose) they usually come at just the right moment, when you most need a break from the usual run-and-shoot.
Considering the game is set in so many diverse locations across Europe, the enemies aren't a particularly varied lot. Although there are a few exceptions (like the German shepherd), it often feels like a dozen soldiers and officers were cloned to create the bulk of the Axis troops. They're not particularly bright, either - they'll usually run away from grenades, and sometimes they'll notice when a buddy nearby gets shot, but there are lots of times where enemies will literally lay down and die for you.
What saves Allied Assault's combat and actually pushes it to an exceptional level, however, is the level design, enemy placement and one nifty convention that drastically curtails your ability to run around guns blazing. When you get shot, your character will jerk out of control for a moment; once caught in a hail of gunfire, it's hard to recover. The normal run-and-gun tactics that work for so many other shooters will have to be traded for a more methodical approach - if you run out in the open at any point, you're likely going to end up dead meat. Even sniping is an exercise in patience - just when you think you've got a shot lined up, you get hit and your shot misses the mark by a mile. By the time you've got your next shot lined up, you're apt to be hit again unless you've retreated to safe cover.
This guy's in a hurry.
Nowhere is this more apparent than the most dreaded enemy in the game (which isn't really an "enemy" at all): the watchtower, which appears in many enemy bases. If you happen to get caught in a tower spotlight, odds are a guard manning a mounted machine gun will cut you to shreds soon after. The same negative reinforcement can be said for many other locations in the game; if there's a foxhole or a crate or something else to hide behind, you darned well better use it for cover or face the consequences. The overall effect helps sell the notion that you're really behind enemy lines, and need to progress carefully.
(Thankfully, there aren't any end-bosses -- boring or otherwise -- in Allied Assault, a long-running tradition of most first-person shooters that I'm only too happy to see going away.)
The one thing that amazed just about everyone here at GameSpy HQ about Allied Assault is the amazing amount of scripting that happens throughout the game. Right from the opening mission, you're fighting alongside fellow Allied soldiers as a rescue mission turns bad. Even as soldiers fall alongside you, the scripting continues… right until the moment they're all wiped out. In later missions, an SAS agent will lead you through an enemy camp; an enemy truck brings reinforcements as you reach the top of a lighthouse; squad members scream and dive around you as you attempt to take a series of bunkers; tanks roll in as you try to prevent a bridge from being blown up…and then there's the tour-de-force Omaha Beach mission.
If for no other reason, Allied Assault is worth buying for this level alone. Basically a recreation of the opening of Saving Private Ryan, it will be all you can do to get off the boat without losing half your health. Just when you think you've stumbled on to another scripted scene of a medic tending to a wounded soldier, he turns and heals you as well. I've played through this level at least 20 times, and still manage to find new and interesting things happening all over the place, from the water to the beachhead.
Medic!
If you play through MoH:AA's missions over and over, you'll soon recognize where these events happen and realize that there isn't much you can do to change them. The first time through, however, it feels so real, so natural, it's amazing to think anyone could plan these sequences so well and so successfully integrate them into the gameplay. It would have been nice if everything had been tied up with a more satisfying ending (heck, any ending would have been better than none at all), but we're not complaining.
One small bonus to the game's missions is the medal system, which rewards you both for completing the game as well as achieving secret objectives in each of the game's six missions. We've actually yet to uncover any of these objectives, but we're looking forward to going back and finding them.
owering all this action is the Quake 3 engine, which arguably has never looked better (although we seem to say that with each successive game that uses it). The models are detailed and animated nicely, and the game offers enough adjustable settings that anyone with a P600 / GeForce2 should be able to get it running smoothly in both the game's indoor and outdoor settings. Rather than listening to me drone on about the graphics, however, just take a look at the pictures on these pages - they should give you a pretty good idea of the exceptional job 2015 has done with the visuals.
It would be easy to mention Allied Assault's sound as an aside, but it too deserves far higher praise than we can give in this space. A massive amount of the game's install space is dedicated to sound, and you have the option of setting the quality settings, which makes a bigger difference than you'd expect. I particularly liked the weapons sounds, especially the satisfying "chink" of the Garand M1 it finished another ammo clip, and the sound of bullets clanking off the metal rails in the Omaha Beach level simply has to be expereinced to be believed. The voiceovers add just the right amount of emotion to the game's characters without getting cheesy, and the game's music, while understated, does an equally fantastic job of setting a movie-like tone for the game without getting too overbearing. All in all, it's hard to think of many PC games with better production quality than Allied Assault.
Fighting The Masses
With one of the best single-player campaigns we've played in years, we hardly would have been surprised if the multiplayer options weren't quite as polished. And while there's nothing particularly groundbreaking in MoH:AA's multiplayer modes, there's still plenty of fun to be had. LAN and Internet play is supported, and while there's no in-game Internet server browser included with the game, GameSpy Arcade is included as a matchmaking service. It's a little annoying to have 4 movies start every time you load up a multiplayer game, but you can at least skip past them quickly enough.
There are eleven multiplayer maps that ship with Allied Assault: seven deathmatch, and four team-based "objective" maps. All are based on levels from the single-player campaign, most running on the medium to large side. Rather than give players the ability to run around with all their weapons at once, you can only carry a pistol, grenades, and one "special" weapon at any particular time, and that weapon will slow you down in varying degrees (depending on which one it is). You can drop your weapon in order to pick up another, and you can also change your "special" weapon between spawns.
The four team-based objective maps can best be described as a combination of many games already being played on the Internet. With an "Axis-vs.-Allies" format, all of the maps have specific objectives for each team to accomplish, such as destroying two cannons atop Omaha Beach or destroying a control room at a V2 rocket base. There's a "last-man standing" mode (think Counter-Strike) where players do not respawn after being killed, and an Assault mode, similar to that of Unreal Tournament or Return to Castle Wolfenstein, where players attack in waves after waves in order to achieve their objectives. We've only had a few days to dig into the multiplayer, but it's already become popular here at the home office, and expect that to continue for some time to come.
A War Won
When I first started playing through my original preview copy of Allied Assault, I was so impressed that I hooked it up to our big-screen and showed it off to the rest of the staff. Turns out I wasn't alone in my excitement - the usually hard-to-impress GameSpy crew was just as amazed and excited as the long lines of people who first got to see it at last year's E3.
We've been waiting for years for developers to finally catch on to the concept of pacing in games; to put themselves in the audience's shoes and understand how to constantly keep them engaged without being repetitive. While other recent games like Halo have offered moments of brilliance, Medal Of Honor: Allied Assault starts strong and never lets up. With a combination of great action and cinematic presentation, it's already an early contender to be one of the best games of 2002.
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thanks for reading my review and i hope you will enjoy the game