Medal of Honor Frontline Review - Console's answer to Allied Assault.

By Sam Coles:

Medal of Honor once reigned supreme before Call of Duty took it out back, shot it in the head and desecrated its corpse to then steal its family. Medal of Honor has always given you the experience of war in the comfort of your living room with different campaigns spanning from the usual flogging of the dead horse of the European fronts to the more exotic locations like North Africa and Japan. Medal of Honor Frontline is my favourite game in the series as it was the truly next generation version I played with improved sounds, graphics and gunplay, does it still hold up today? In short yes.

You play as an operative named Jimmy who undertakes missions throughout Europe from the D-Day landings to the infamous Operation Market Garden and these are all executed well with different locations and objectives to keep things fresh. You won’t be just shooting Nazi’s sometimes the game will switch gears and slow down as you will sometimes go undercover as kitchen staff at a Nazi dinner or as a SS Officer it’s great as it gives you time to pause.

Gameplay is rather simple you point and you shoot and it is fast paced but it can grind to a stop when you need to aim accurately as you will need to do this to take down enemies effectively. The problem when you’re aiming like the older games you can’t move which has this red light, green light approach when it comes to combat. Overall the combat is satisfying when you get into the rhythm of it.

The presentation still looks pretty good considering it’s an early PS2 game, however there are some blurry and drab textures but it is old so I can’t fault it for that, if you want a better looking version of this game get it on the original Xbox. The animation is fantastic as enemies will react to where they’ve been shot and will dodge and take cover from your fire; the animations are still impressive even by today’s standards.

The sound design is superb the guns sound as if they do actual damage with the chatter of the MP40 to deep rumble of the screen shaking trench gun which is my favourite weapon to use in the game. The soundtrack is great complementing the action with over the top orchestral scores.

The only major problem I have with Medal of Honor Frontline is that it gets ridiculously hard in the last half of the game it proceeds to kick you in the nuts and never stops, it also doesn’t help that the enemy’s health is increased and they can take a point blank shotgun blast on the chin. This was a pattern with the older Medal of Honor games they get really hard on the last few levels and sometimes it feels a bit cheap.

Medal of Honor Frontline is one of the best games in the series and deserves a space in your PS2, GameCube or Xbox collection, it’s easy to find and super cheap especially on PS2 as I picked up my copy up for 75p go out and get it.