If you can get past the bugs there is a fantastic game waiting to be played.
MOH continued a weird trend for me in which it had no video options at all aside from picking your resolution. My last game Singularity had the same issue. Luckily 1920*1200 was supported. One thing I was surprised about was the story was very good. The ending felt abrupt but overall it kept me hooked on the game and seemed much more realistic than other games in the FPS genre like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. The reason I found it more realistic is the missions you perform seem much more like what actual military units would do. You are doing recon on areas, calling in airstrikes, clearing villages, reporting enemy numbers and movement. In games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare you are basically saving the entire world from a madman with a nuke while in MOH you are a small part of the war doing your small contribution to the overall effort. It's not that I don't enjoy saving the whole world now and then but MOH had a refreshing concept that felt fresh. I wish the single player campaign were longer as it stood at about 5-6 hours on the hardest difficulty and the ending seem to come out of nowhere. Better pacing would have been nice.
Unlike Singularity MOH actually had decent graphics for me not having any options. It still did not rival the graphics powerhouses like Crysis but it didn't look like it was 5 years old either like Singularity did. The weapon detail was very good, as was the water detail and the lighting. I also loved the reload animations on most of the weapons. I thought that the glass was very poor looking though. When you are in a vehicle and the glass gets shot it looks very fake. Joint Operations: Typhoon Rising did a better job with glass and it came out in 2004. I also didn't like how the enemy corpses didn't have bullet holes in them. I'm a fan of viewing my handy work and in this day and age it isn't a hard feature to have in your game. I noticed little things as well such as some of my friendly NPC's guns would poke through their body when it was around their back. Not a game breaking issue by any stretch but every bit of polish helps. Inside of the buildings could of used a more fine detail. I mean they were just pretty void of anything. I mean on SWAT 4 the rooms were filled with little detail such as cigarette buts, magazines, phones, basically they looked like a realistic room. MOH's rooms had a table and maybe a piece of paper on the walls but they didn't look like anybody lived there. The snow, the dirt, and the facial detail on characters were all mediocre as well. They were by no means poor but I can name several games that beat MOH on those fronts by a wide margin. The blood spray when shooting an enemy was very good though and fun to watch.
The game play shocked me in a good way. There were no infinite number of enemies like Call of Duty which was not what I expected going in. I had some good options like toggling crouch, going prone, and leaning. Basic features yes but so many games these days lack them. I could change the fire mode on my M4 which was great. The sniper rifles felt so powerful mostly because of how they crumpled the enemy. You could turn the HUD on and off at will which was a feature I don't see many games using but it worked great. It leaves your screen uncluttered until you want to look at something quickly and then you can put it back to a nice clean screen. The enemy snipers had glare on their scope which was a nice touch. The real excellent part of the game play though was the variety There were driving sections, rail sections, basic shooting sections, and also the target guiding sections. These were awesome. At different parts of the game you got to call in close air support and using lasers paint targets such as vehicles and machine gun nests. You got to call in laser guided bombs, Apache helicopters, machine gun fire, it was really well done. Speaking of those Apache helicopters there is one mission where you get to fly one and do a search and destroy mission looking for mortar teams. There were no poorly done missions. The flying was intuitive, the rail missions not too long, the laser targeting satisfying to watch, and they were jumbled up enough hat you never did one thing too much. Now sadly all that awesomeness I just described was in between a crap load of bugs for me. One out every 2 times I tried to start the game up I would get a general protection fault error. On the third mission My character wouldn't sit down on his ATV which meant I couldn't progress through the mission and had to restart the whole mission. On the second play through of that third mission my NPC team mate wouldn't move at one point making me reload to the previous checkpoint. On the second last mission of the game I suddenly could not sprint or crouch and I had to restart the whole mission. On top of this the game uses a checkpoint save system and has no quick save It has regenerating health not med kits Enemies can blind fire from cover but you have no cover function and can't blind fire. The M4's felt very weak. It took 3-4 shots to take down an enemy and sometimes they barely flinched at being shot. Maybe they were on PCP I don't know. The pistol felt like it had more of a punch to it than the M4 did. I also could only hold 3 guns at once which while more than halo is less than painkiller. If I have to choose I like to hold all my guns. There is also the all too common red screen when you are shot. It is as annoying as in every other game it is used in.
The audio was solid. The weapon effects were great with exception to the m4 which sounded like a pellet gun. The little things like the sound of stepping on water were done well. The voice acting was well done and the dialogue was to. I had no complaints about the audio except for the M4.
I don't play online so I won't be touching that. One thing I want to point out is the game gave me the option of disc based authentication or online based which I wish more games would do. I'll take disc based any day of the week. MOH would have been a 9.0 game if not for the bugs. It's sad really. The game is still very enjoyable and I would recommend to any FPS fans out there. The game can be found still for $19.99 most places. It will be well worth your money. I was pleasantly surprised with my experience. I have to lower the score for the bugs though so 8.0 is all I can give. This is a 9.0 game otherwise though. Try it out folks.
Final Score: 8.0