Flawless shooter multiplayer, best on any portable. Single player is half-assed. Bot MP is only FFA, no bots in Ad Hoc.
I'll start off with the game's technical quality. The graphics are great. Levels are GIGANTIC and well-detailed, with fog only appearing in levels that would realistically contain fog. Levels also have a ton of attention to detail. Human models move beautifully, but look creepy when standing still, and some animations are buggy online (some people will still be standing up after they die). The models have a lot of polygons for such a well-detailed PSP game, especially the weapons which look great when aiming down the sight.
The sound effects are the great stuff that you hear on the console and PC versions of Medal of Honor. The dialogue, however, hardly exists. Teammates all speak with the exact-same voice. The voice has only a few lines, AND he shouts really loud, so you'll hear the same annoying shouts over and over. German enemies, for the first time in a Medal of Honor game, speak English. God knows why. The guy that does the briefings in the earlier Medal of Honor games makes a comeback with some great voicework for the cinematics.
The controls are the best you'll ever get on the one-joystick PSP. You can configure the sensitivity, and you get an auto-aim feature that will move your crosshair towards an enemy, but only slightly. I prefer the default controls, though most people like to move with the face buttons and aim with the analog nub.
It would've been nice if, for people who aim with the face buttons, the game would switch the controls to aim with the analog stick when the player's using a sniper rifle or a stationary machine gun.
Everything that has to do with controls is just wonderful. Movement is fluid and comfortable, with the screen shaking at inappropriate times, such as when the player lands a fierce melee attack on an opponent.
The game contains all of the weapons from Allied Assault- Grenades, pistols, rifles, submachine guns, machine guns, sniper rifles, and even bazookas and a shotgun. The only difference is the sniper rifles. The Americans use the Enfield (which has only five bullets in a clip for some reason) rather than the Springfield, and the Germans use the semi-automatic Gewehr with a scope, rather than a scoped Mauser.
The single player isn't the kind of single player you'd expect from a Medal of Honor game. Though having teammates is fun (you usually get three or four), you'll often have more teammates than enemies. Speaking of which, there are hardly any enemies at one time. You'll usually only be fighting two or three enemies at once, even in the game's MASSIVE battlegrounds, so the levels are kind of empty and the action isn't all that exciting. You and your allies will outnumber your enemies most of the time, making your enemies not only few in numbers, but shortlived.
When your allies die, they will automatically respawn somewhere off-screen and make their way towards you if you go near their general area. I thought that was a really cool feature, because having mortal allies makes the game more dynamic, but having them come back to life to stand by the player keeps the fun alive, or as much fun as you can manage in the Heroes campaign.
Allies will never move on their own, and you can't boss them around. They will instead follow the player. When the player moves somewhere and then stops, the player's allies will move as well and stand around him in pre-defined positions. They make the a repetitive "shaking gear" noise whenever they move, and they all move at the same time. Sometimes, the player's allies will simply run off, as far as they can get from the player, even when they were following him moments before.
Though the allies don't have a free will and every noise they make is annoying, they're still really fun to have. The single player isn't all that great, but teammates at least make it better, and it's fun to watch them fight enemies. They look like zombies out of combat, but during a fight they're lively and active, supporting eachother, finding cover and throwing grenades. They LOVE standing around grenades and any other deadly explosives. That's why they automatically respawn.
There's no spoken dialogue in the single player telling you your objectives or anything, no music, and not much ambience (standard "big, non-existant battle in the background" stuff), so besides your annoying teammates, the game is a bit quiet. It seems like they could have done a lot more in the dialogue and music department.
The AI isn't terrific. The AI will sometimes run back and forth before going to where they want to go. They love standing around explosives, though that means the player can put his grenades to good use since enemies will ignore grenades or run near them more often than they'll throw them back at the player. The AI never use the stationary machine guns, and I never had a chance to use the stationary machine guns on any enemies. Even in multiplayer, stationary machine guns get little to no use because multiplayer can be such a sniper-fest.
Here's how every single player campaign level goes down:
1) You get to read some stuff, like in most of the Medal of Honor games, vaguely telling you your objectives.
2) The level begins. You're usually surrounded by your three or four allies, or you meet up with them somewhere immediately ahead.
3) You get one yellow main mission objective (more on "domination" levels), and a small number of blue ones, all pointed out on the radar, scattered about the place.
4) You can go straight to the yellow objective(s), or you can visit the blue secondary objectives, meeting with little enemy resistance.
5) Once you complete your yellow objective, you're usually directed to another yellow objective, which almost always consists of "Leave", meaning you just go back to the beginning of the level, meeting a bit more German resistance than the first time through.
6) The end.
All of the single player levels are just mutliplayer levels where the player has one life, AI teammates, and small amounts of randomly spawning AI enemies, with stuff lying around the level that the player has to get, usually in any order he chooses. The architecture is otherwise unchanged.
The levels are all of unique design, ranging from bombed-out urban areas (my favorite!) to snowy, rural towns and open fields. There's even an oversized beach called "The Beachhead", though you won't feel like you're rushing up the beach to get anywhere.
Only a few levels are taken from European Assault's multiplayer, and even then, they're modified dramatically to be bigger and look nicer. Pretty much the only similarities for some levels consist of landmarks.
Some levels contain cool-looking tanks and other vehicles, but they're all COMPLETELY unusable. They might as well be painted walls, as they don't move and can't be damaged or anything.
The weather on levels ranges from moderate to completely snowed over, with one level featuring rain and another level featuring falling snow.
Though the game boasts to contain fifteen levels, three of them are just night time versions of three other levels, really making for twelve levels. But they're still awesome and well-made.
Skirmish mode is a one-player deathmatch multiplayer mode with a maximum of sixteen bots which are all decent in intelligence and challenge, though they act more like freaky single player AI than they do like player simulants. Sadly, you're limited to free-for-all, which can be fun for a while, but it's weird that they didn't bother including an Axis versus Allies team deathmatch or something, which wouldn't have been hard to program in at all.
So, offline, though not BAD, is not what you'd expect from a Medal of Honor game. I sometimes play one round of offline deathmatch or play a quick level on single player, but it's never for very long. If the single player was designed for anything, it was so people would have something to do while not online, and so they could practice on the multiplayer levels against easy AI.
Now, the multiplayer. AMAZING.
You can have thirty-two players in a COMPLETELY LAG-FREE match. The only reason people thought the game would lag because it allows for thirty-two guys in one game is because they're stupid idiots who are in denial that a Medal of Honor game is better than their fanboy games. Lag comes from slow servers. If the PSP can render the visuals and audio, then it can handle a multiplayer game with thirty-two people.
The colossal levels easily accomodate thirty-two combatants. It's the kind of multiplayer you'd expect from a PC game. Full, all-out battle with a full amount of players, no lag, and plenty of gametypes. Friggin' amazing. It's a lot more fair than the multiplayer of SOCOM Fireteam Bravo, as you don't automatically aim at enemies, but must instead aim at them manually. Sorry for comparing Heroes to FB, but FB is the only other PSP game with awesome online multiplayer that I've played on the PSP.
Basically, when going online, a player looks at the list of servers and hops on board one. It took me months to figure out how to set filters (use the joystick and move it to the left or right to get to other menus). The player chooses his skin (skins are unlocked under varying conditions), his weapon (team-specific, unless in Free For All) and leaps into the battle.
Because of an utter lack of advertisement and popularity, only a little over two hundred people play Heroes online at one time at the writing of this sentence. Any fan of online console shooters like Halo 2 can easily appreciate the multiplayer of Heroes. I let my friend, who's a HUGE Halo and Call of Duty fan (he's an XBOX-loving kind of guy) borrow Medal of Honor: Heroes for a week. He absolutely loved every bit of the online feature.
I will need to speak of the problems, of course, as even this great game is riddled with some EXTREMELY poor decisions on the parts of the creators, and just a few bugs.
Animations are buggy. Sometimes, someone will die, but they'll look like they're still standing up. Also, people are rewarded to their online score for kills and only kills, even on gametypes like Capture the Flag, so instead of capturing the flag, people will just kill eachother.
There's NO Team Deathmatch. By sweet Jesus, the best gametype of all and they neglected to put it in! I love Medal of Honor: Allied Assault because pretty much the only gametype that's ever played is Team Deathmatch (since Free For All and Objective-Based are the only other gametypes), and players will spawn everywhere randomly (near teammates) and it's all-out crazy battle. I hate having to attack things or defend things, sometimes I'd just rather brawl. It's especially annoying to only spawn in one area, I like how in Team Deathmatch spawn points are relocated according to where the team is.
I can't even tell the difference between most of the gametypes. They tried to make Capture the Flag seem unique by calling it "Infiltration", but that just trivializes everything. Each level only supports ONE GAMETYPE, plus Free For All. Basically, each gametype can be played on three different levels and that's that. You can play Capture the Flag on three different levels, but you can't play it on any of the many others. I hate any gametype besides Team Deathmatch, and the fact that Heroes contains no TDM one level only supports one gametype doesn't help. For some reason, all of the servers that are full of people are the servers that run the same terrible levels over and over.
Which brings me to the subject of punk snipers and rocket whores. The levels that are most played are the levels where snipers are everywhere and they can see anywhere. Though every level looks great and is very unique, most of them are extremely frustrating to play with other human beings. The worst of all levels is a bridge in which the teams have to compete to hold the center. Once one team gets the center, they instantly win by default because only a few people will have the balls to try to make it to the center, and those few will instantly be sniped because snipers are ALL OVER THE BRIDGE LEVEL ALL THE TIME. The bridge is completely empty because of this, except perhaps one guy in the middle holding the capturing point. Not only are almost all of the levels riddled with more snipers than anything, but the rocket launcher is a weapon that can be accessed at any time, and often is by many people. Sometimes, nobody will have a rocket launcher, but one person will get it and suddenly EVERYONE has one. For some stupid reason, weapons like the rocket launcher can't be disabled, at least on non-dedicated servers, though it's probably the same with dedicated servers.
There's no team balance. You'll find wimps on any online video game who hate to be on the losing team, even if they're the ones bringing it down, so they'll switch to the winning team, which is usually the team with the most players, or ends up being the team with the most players when every wimp goes to it. It's impossible to help bring up a server from a small amount of players to a large amount of players, because there's an extremely high chance that everyone will join one team while people that actually have balls will be completely alone on the opposite team. Can they really expect me to stay in a game where I'm the only guy on the Allies team and four retards are on the Axis team?
Deactivating friendly fire doesn't work. Any explosive, be it rocket or grenade, will hurt teammates. This is the same stupid problem that existed in Medal of Honor: Rising Sun. I don't know how they could've missed this. It's so annoying when some retard with a rocket launcher can just start killing all of his "teammates" in the spawn area.
The voting system isn't very obvious. "Vote Started" appears in the same color and location as all of the other messages, so it's incredibly unlikely that anyone will notice the vote, especially because you have to go to the menu, go to "VOTE" and then vote. The reason this is so terrible is because it's almost impossible to kick rampant team-killers or, worse yet, glitch-abusers.
Speaking of which, once I was playing a game against some idiot who had somehow performed some sort of glitch that made him COMPLETELY UNKILLABLE. Vote Kick did nothing (no surprises there), and it was especially worse because he was a clan member of the server so his retarded clan member pals voted against him being kicked. Obviously, that's not the kind of server you'd want to play on.
As an offline game, you won't have that much fun with Medal of Honor Heroes, as the single player is weirdly empty and quiet, the skirmish mode is limited to free-for-all, and the Ad Hoc multiplayer is limited to normal multiplayer (no co-op mode) with only eight players and no bots, so in the event that you could actually get SEVEN people with PSPs and Medal of Honor: Heroes to play the game with you, you probably wouldn't enjoy it, anyway.
I was REALLY disappointed, as I thought the single player was going to be more like European Assault with big battles, tons of scripted dialogue and characters, and more interesting objectives. The only thing that ever brings me back to offline Heroes is that the AI enemies are fun to fight, the AI buddies are nifty, and the controls and weapons are all so unbelievably terrific for a PSP game.
As an online game, if you like FPSs, you'll fall in love with Heroes. It's the best shooter multiplayer you could possibly get on any portable system, despite some obvious problems that were almost all just poor decisions by the creators. You get tons of players in one game, it's lag-free, and there's a dozen really great levels.
If you want a good single player shooter experience, you could always play Brothers in Arms, though it won't offer the satisfying get-in-the-enemy's-face-and-slaughter-everyone feeling that Medal of Honor does, and the controls and AI for Call of Duty are so unpleasently worse than the controls and AI of Heroes as to ruin any addiction the game could invoke.
One thing that appauls me is the ratings for Heroes. Many people who reviewed the game concentrated on the single player and made little mention of the multiplayer, basing their scores on the single player alone. Some people didn't even bother saying ANYTHING about the multiplayer or would spout crap about how EA Games was just rushing to get the first World War 2 PSP game, and such reviews shouldn't exist due to their utter lack of appreciation for what the game is actually built for.
EA Games was also misleading. In a number of interviews and descriptions of the game, they say that the game contains a "new story line" and an "all-new Medal of Honor adventure" and all of that crap, in reference to the single player, which hardly has any sort of story to it and completely lacks scripted events and dialogue. EA Games hardly makes any mention of their revolutionary, astonishing, unmatched multiplayer.
The single player should've been their biggest secret! It's obvious that they hardly worked on it at all and put all of their efforts into the multiplayer. They should've openly said the truth: "The game is meant to be a great online multiplayer shooter on a portable system. The single player is nothing more than practice." Instead, they practically acted like the multiplayer was just some crappy Ad Hoc nonsense and they were like "SKIRMISH IS AWESOME! THE CAMPAIGN IS SO COOL! IT'S THE BOMB!"
Let me just summarize the entire game: It is a nearly perfect online portable first person shooter with incredible multiplayer and wonderful controls. The few problems the game contains mean NOTHING, as Heroes is WITHOUT COMPETITION. No other shooter game on ANY portable system has the technical quality, majestic levels or amazing online multiplayer that Heroes has.
EA Games wasn't rushing to get the first World War 2 game on the PSP, they were working to get the best online FPS on any portable system.
If you're going to get Medal of Honor: Heroes and you're not going to play it online, you will find the game to be worthless, a pointless experience overall.
If you're going to get Medal of Honor: Heroes because you want a shooter for a portable system that has incredible online multiplayer, you will make no mistake. At the writing of this review, Heroes is the BEST thing you can ever get in the department of an online multiplayer shooter.