Saturday, 3 February 2018

Medal of Honor: Warfighter Review - When the job interferes with family life


By Sam Coles:

There are games that get a lot of negative attention which baffles me; the reason why it confuses me is that the fact there is nothing inherently wrong with them. Medal of Honor: Warfigther is one of those games, originally released in 2012; it got a lot of negative attention due to it being “generic” when its contemporises Battlefield and Call of Duty were doing the same. Maybe people didn’t like the fact the games were based on real life events in modern warfare from the afghan war with the 2010 reboot and various Tier 1 missions in Warfigher. This got EA and Danger Close games in a lot of hot water because the Tier 1 operatives they were working with were revealing too much information that was classified. Is the game bad? No to be honest it has a very tense and emotional campaign and when the game was active a unique and engaging multiplayer.

The story follows Preacher, one of the side characters in the reboot in 2010, he finds himself alone due to his job getting in the way of his family which has split him and his wife up. There is a terrorist threat in the form of The Cleric, who has been orchestrating suicide bombings across the globe. Various groups and people are involved even old allies that helped the Tier 1 groups back in the 90’s. The story is engaging as you see that Preacher has to prioritise his work over his family and it starts to take its toll on him and his family as he constantly has to shut his wife out.

Medal of Honor: Warfigther is a first person shooter, which has an emphasis on team work with your squad as it is the only source of accumulating more ammunition for your weapon. Gunplay is solid, which to be honest I wouldn’t expect anything less as this game plays like Battlefield 3 as it runs on the Frostbite 2 engine, but the guns have actual recoil compared that game, giving it a realistic edge.

The game has an obsession with breaching doors, so much so that they include a wheel which has various ways of breaching and you can unlock more by scoring headshots during the breaching process. It’s an odd inclusion but it keeps the breaching fresh with the unique animations, these can include the classic booting the door in and throwing a flashbang to blowing locks off the door with a shotgun.

For game that came out nearly six years ago it still looks exceptionally good, the Frostbite 2 engine is beautiful and considering the limited hardware of the 360 it is amazing to look at. There is so much detail in the environments with trees reacting to explosions to your character’s clothes and skin being wet when it is raining or when they have been swimming.

Is there anything wrong with the game? Well the game has some framerate issue on 360, as it does start to stutter in some of the busy sections with lots of gunfire and weather effects. Also there are some clipping issues with enemies, as I shot someone once and they merged with the wall to form a concrete and flesh like entity.


Medal of Honor: Warfighter is a good game, with tense gameplay and an engaging narrative, I don’t understand the negative attention it got with its initial release. I hope EA (maybe not EA), or some other publisher to bring the series back, with Call of Duty back in World War II maybe it’s Medal of Honor’s time to shine.  

No comments:

Post a Comment