Rising Sun is damaged by linear levels and uninspired gameplay that falls short of the quality of its predecessor.
In this painful adventure, you play as Joe Griffin, who is on board a navy vessel during the attack on Pearl Harbor. In the beginning, you are given a fun little tutorial that involves extinguishing and leaping fires, while dodging deadly gas. However, the rest of your time here isn’t very enjoyable thanks to a lifeless turret segment. During this mindless killing spree, you shoot down countless planes controlled by kamikaze pilots, who don’t want to sink the ship, but want to die. Eventually, you will are blown out of the ship and find yourself submerged, helpless against the attacking planes. When you reach ground, you will have to suffer another rail-shooting mission. During this segment, you need to protect your boat while it goes on a rescue mission, but if you keep your finger on the trigger button, you will do just fine.
The lengthy missions offer many hours of gameplay, but considering the blandness of the game, that isn’t a good thing. It takes you 10-15 hours to get to the end of this mess. When you finally make it to the end of the levels, EA usually knocks you over the head with a terrible cutscene with even worse lip synching. These cutscenes are meant to develop a story, but since you feel no connection with a living soul, the plot doesn’t push you to complete more levels. You also get letters from home. These try to make you feel sympathy for Joe by showing a cutscene of him reading a post card from his family. Although, Rising Sun doesn’t make you interested in his family, so these cutscenes end up feeling tacked on.
On a positive note, you are put into many different situations. In one level you will find yourself in a small rowboat with a rifle. In another you will be unloading your ammunition upon multiple enemies on a large aircraft carrier. Throughout all of the ten missions you will just be going through a shooting gallery, stuffed with secret papers to acquire and random objects to obliterate. There are some interesting sequences such as the one where you take out baddies using a turret atop an elephant. While these try to add a bit of Flavor to the levels, they just serve as a disguise from the lack of originality. Rising Sun tries to branch out from its roots by adding extra paths that were supposed to open up new opportunities, but it didn’t quite reach its goal. There are only a few of these extra trails in the whole game. Plus, most of them ended up leading to a place further away from my objective.
Another aspect that makes these levels so dreary is the brainless enemy A.I. Your armed foes will usually wait for you to reload and shoot at you with laughable accuracy. Their only tactic is to stand there and shoot at you, even when cover is a foot away. The melee attacks that some opposing soldiers will perform is pretty dangerous, but it’s totally in-effective at far range.
Luckily, you can easily fight this opposition using the varied weapons available to you in Rising Sun. Like many WWII games, Rising Sun gives you the standard M1 Garand and Thompson. You will also get to use some rare weapons such as the Welrod, a powerful silenced pistol. Each firearm is very satisfying to shoot, due to realistic kick-back and sound effects. The great feeling that you get when unleashing these guns will eventually die down after a couple hours, though. Also, you don’t even have the ability to acquire the weapons that enemies drop. With all the damaged aspects of this game, the one thing that keeps this game standing is the music.
You may be bored to tears mowing down your opponents in Guadalcanal, but at least you get to enjoy a genuine soundtrack. The soundtrack is made up of all Japanese songs which match the setting of Rising Sun perfectly. Pulling the trigger on a gun will create the same explosive or silent sound that you would hear in real life. Sadly, the voice acting isn’t as top-notch as the sound effects. The main character sounds like a teenager and none of the voices show any emotion. Even with some flaws the sound still shines over the muddy environments.
Rising Sun sends you off to picturesque areas that would be beautiful if it weren’t for the poor amount of detail put into your surroundings. The game is uninviting due to the many blocky objects that pull you out of the experience. The weapon models look a bit more polished, but they still look quite murky. The character models look generic with faces that lack any detail and uniforms that look painted onto their bodies. The co-op that will split the screen in two will make the game look grubbier.
In co-op mode you only have half the screen to experience the flat shootouts, making the gameplay twice as excruciating. One mission has one player manning a turret on a tank and the other protecting it. While new situations like this are quite entertaining, they feel half-baked. Rising Sun also offers a competitive multiplayer that ends up feeling tacked on. With ten uninteresting maps and only two game modes, the multiplayer won’t keep you intrigued. The maps usually are fairly small and all of them are in need of some tweaking. The two modes include normal death match and team death match, which are lacking in excitement. Rising Sun also throws in the option to include computer controlled bots in a multiplayer game. These bots are actually much wiser than those in the single player, but they have an annoying tendency to run away from you.
Medal of Honor: Rising Sun doesn’t push the genre forward in any way. Its average shooting gallery style gameplay is bogged down by many flaws. There are many better WWII shooters out on the market, so I advise staying away from this faulty entry into the popular Medal of Honor franchise.