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Medal of Honoris just another first person shooter – mechanically speaking anyway. Under most circumstances it would be played, almost immediately filed away, and forgotten as a cash-in on assembly line. Even if most people wholly believe this, I still think the game’s sole unique crux gives it some value.
It would be really sad if we used Medal of Honor’s orthodoxy to dismiss the fact that it is virtually the first military shooter that isn’t afraid to take place in the real world. Despite pretty much everything else about the game being identical the rest of the market, that one little detail still gave it a unique relevancy for me.
The first missions in the game have you doing covert special forces type stuff as DEVGRU (aka Seal Team 6) before the main American invasion force arrives in Afghanistan. Y’know, sneaking through villages, working alliances with any Afghans who hate the Taliban, trying to eliminate an enemy by becoming wholly embedded in his environment.
From there Medal of Honor becomes your basic story about guys on the ground having to deal with bullshit orders from armchair commanders a thousand miles away. Still, the fact that the trope here preludes the war we are currently in the middle of turns it into an odd commentary. I consider the fact that the game even caused me to think seriously about what’s going on down there now an accomplishment over Call of Duty. How many games actually get you to think about stuff?
Running out in the daylight and suppressing – not killing, a machine gun nest with the Army Rangers is an apt transition in Medal of Honor – leading up to probably my favorite scripted moment of the campaign: Your team, caught unawares by the sound of a cell phone triggering a bomb, is ambushed with only small hut as cover. As RPGs constantly chip away at the hut, your cover get’s smaller and smaller along with your team’s ammo reserves as the enemy force get’s bigger and bigger. Memories of Modern Warfare 2’s multiple scripted player character deaths made me feel like this wasn’t going to end well.
Continuing through the rest of the campaign I actually learned one or two things about the actual Afghanistan war. I don’t think I’ve gotten that from any other military game save Metal Gear. The above-average voice acting and continually amazing use of the Unreal 3 Engine didn’t hurt any of this.
So, yes, Medal of Honor for the most part is the same game as Call of Duty 4, I’ve even been over how redundant the multiplayer is, but was its purpose to present a different kind of shooter? Not really.
If this game had come out three years ago, or if Call of Duty 4 had decided to be about the real war on terrorism, maybe we’d have seen it as a big step for shooters. Now though, Medal of Honor is an application of the established military shooter framework to the stories of what’s actually happening in the world today. It takes the video game language we know, and tackles the real world with it. No matter how Medal of Honor chooses to handle that subject matter, it’s still right now just about the first mainstream game to actually try, and that’s what’s important.