Medal of Honor: Airborne (PS3)

A decent sequel in the popular military shooter franchise.
1/31/2008 12:00 AM | 1 Comments | Page 1 of 2

Let's face it, EA has milked its Medal of Honor franchise more than a freakin' dairy cow -- and with mixed success. While there have been phenomenal titles such as Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and Medal of Honor: Frontline, there have also been less-than-stellar iterations including Medal of Honor: Vanguard and Medal of Honor: Rising Sun.

Medal of Honor: Airborne is the latest in the WWII 3-D shooter series, and it falls somewhere in the middle between the subpar and superb. It's a very good -- but not great -- game that should at least give players a few exhilarating hours of military action.

This time around you step into the combat boots of a U.S. paratrooper. 'Go! Go! Go!' are the first words you'll hear after booting up the game, as you follow fellow soldiers towards the open door of a C-47 aircraft and parachute down into hostile territory.

The first thing you'll notice about Airborne is that it's the most open-ended game in the franchise, so you can more or less land wherever you like -- be it on the ground within the safety zone marked by green smoke, or on a rooftop inside of an Axis stronghold -- and then combat the enemy troops by following one of a few paths to victory.

Compare this to past Medal of Honor games, where players are kept on a fairly tight leash with impassable obstacles or invisible walls preventing any deviation from the linear path. Along with this more open-ended environment, there is also no particular order in which objectives -- such as knocking out a Tiger Tank or a communications tower, locating POWs, or eliminating a German commander -- must be completed for each location.

The game begins with Operation Husky, where you'll drop into a Sicilian village, and ends with a climactic fight in and around a huge vertical concrete tower in Germany. In fact, the level design and mission objectives tend to get better the more you plow through the single-player campaign. As with other Medal of Honor games, most are based on real WWII locations and events, while EA says the final battle is a slight deviation, based on a little-known top-secret German weapon in production during the war.

'OK, but how about the gameplay?' you're asking. Once you're on the ground, Airborne will be familiar to previous Medal of Honor players: Skulk around from a first-person perspective; swap between guns, grenades and other found weapons; and analyze the environment to determine how to best handle the situation with help from an onscreen map that indicates where the allied (green) and enemy (red) troops are. Running into every situation with guns blazing, in plain view of the enemy troops, is not how to play this game; instead, it's key to use cover and height to your advantage, such as by crouching behind a wall or sandbags or firing off balconies and rooftops, respectively.

But you first need to make it onto the ground safely. You can steer the chute using the left analog stick and flare the chute to slow down a tad by pressing and holding the flare ('X') button. You can botch your landing if you fail to flare your chute in time, which means it takes longer for you to get up and fight. A 'greased' landing is when you approach the drop zone at a steep angle, hitting the ground running, so to speak.