Review: Medal of Honor (or Honour if you are British or simply eccentric) beta
So either by pure luck (and by luck, I mean a mistake on Valve’s part) or by sheer consequence, I got to try a beta of Medal of Honor today and can I safely say that I am very disappointed.
As you probably already know (or maybe you don’t), the multiplayer portion of Medal of Honor is being developed by DICE – the company that brought us great games like Battlefield 1942 and more recently Bad Company 2. BC2 features almost completely destructive environments, 4 classes of soldiers (Assault, Medic, Engineer, and Sniper), and a plethora of game modes. The maps are big, but not too big (if you know what I mean) and the environments are refreshing. The weapons fire with realistic recoil and bullets don’t fire into the same spot, unlike CoD4: Modern Warfare 2.
Medal of Honor on the other hand seems like a step backwards for DICE and features nothing we haven’t seen before in shooters like Modern Warfare or even Valve’s own Counter Strike: Source. From the maps I got to try (there were only 2!) I got an impression that EA and DICE had a meeting sometime before this game went into development and they thought of ways to make this game exactly like Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare.
Destructive environments are gone and so is the engineer class. Funny enough you can drive vehicles in this game, but I guess you can’t repair them? I am still confused about that. There is absolutely nothing original about this game’s multiplayer. It’s like DICE just “copy and pasted” everything from Bad Company 2 into this game. Even the sounds they use are the same! How lazy is that? I know that both games come from the same house – Electronic Arts or as I like to call them the “Devil’s Asshole” – but can we have some creativity, please? NO? OK. I can hear you asking me: “Suvo, why do you call them that?”, it’s simple why, three words – “Westwood” and “Ensemble Studios” – but that is a totally different subject, into which I cannot indulge myself to get into at this moment.
Now I know this is a beta and the game is still in development, but it is clear what direction EA is taking this game into and I think they are setting themselves up for failure. They are hyping this game up into something it is not. The marker is over-saturated with this type of shooters, especially those that have a Middle Eastern setting. And there is nothing creative or original that will keep the players intrigued. EA is a little too late to the party, but that is just my opinion.
To make this story short, if you already own Bad Company 2, do not buy this game. If you do, then you will experience the biggest deja vu moment of your life!
