Missing in Action…
Itâs no secret that the Medal of Honor franchise has gone through some bad spells over the years, especially with Call of Duty and Battlefield surpassing it in every conceivable way, and yet I do feel sorry for the series that I once used to love. It tried last year to leave WWII behind forever and head to a more realistic, gritty shooter set in Afghanistan and sadly it was met with mixed responses from critics but showed promise, unfortunately the same cannot be said for the sequel…
The story is a convoluted mess that doesnât really make you want to go fighting, even if some of the elements are from real soldiers, it comes across as unconvincing and the melodrama of the pre-rendered cutscenes with one soldier and his wife and kid are dreadful to say the least. The campaign itself is only a couple of hours long and after completing it, thereâs little reason to return to the battlefield.
The campaign is pretty awful to be honest, it feels like a âby-the-numbersâ type where each shootout feels the same as the previous one, I got my first suspicions that the campaign wasnât up to much when I popped in Disc 1 of the game only to find the multiplayer available…thatâs right, the single player is on the second disc! Iâve never heard of anything so insane in all my years of gaming, the game also insists you install the game for higher resolution textures, if you donât then basic things like posters and boxes tend to look like something from the PS2 era, so make sure you have over 1GB on your HDD.
As a shooter, Warfighter doesnât do anything wrong. It handles well, but it obviously borrows heavily from the COD setup of control. AI is a mess though, your teammates wonât do a lot to help you and pretty much run off to do their own thing, while enemy AI isnât that smart either. The real focus of Warfighter seems to be the multiplayer, which is probably why itâs on Disc 1.It has some nice ideas, but ultimately theyâve been done before and better than what is on offer here.
The visuals are pretty lackluster, even with the higher texture install. Facial models look pretty awful, while the locations boil down from nice to average, but never amazing. Voice-acting is a mixed bag, while the music is forgettable.
The Verdict
Medal of Honor: Warfighter fails to surpass the competition with a dull campaign, forgettable story and a simplistic multiplayer. Itâs not the worst shooter out there, it does a lot of things right…itâs just that itâs been done better and sadly, Warfighter isnât memorable.
