In anticipation of the next installment being shown at E3 next week, Bloodworth examines Medal of Honor: Frontline.
Opening with war footage and an inspiring narration, Medal of Honor: Frontline preps the player for the intense onslaughts of war. Intense is probably the best word to describe Frontline, and to showcase that intensity, Frontline begins with our hero James Patterson storming the beach at Normandy. There are soldiers coughing and vomiting, bodies, debris, and wrecked ships strewn across the beach, and a constant dropping of bombs and rain of gunfire. After successfully storming the bunker, you’ll be pulled onto special assignments ranging from stowing away on a German submarine to crossing the farmlands of Holland to meeting an informant at a bar to sabotaging plans for a jet-propelled aircraft – and most of the time you’ll be on your own.
There’s no doubt that Medal of Honor is challenging, and passing a level unfortunately requires a lot of trial and error and repetition. Many stages are ten to fifteen minutes long, and if near the end, you get to a new room that you don’t know how to handle, you’ll be taken out quickly and will need to start from scratch. It’s almost like a puzzle game in a sense. In each area, you have to locate the troops and know which weapon is going to take them out quickly. Medical kits are abundant, but the speed that your health can be reduced makes that fact almost irrelevant, and the levels have a way of deceiving you into thinking that you’re almost done when there’s actually still a long way to go.
The level design is convincing and quite varied. In addition to the submarine and farm mentioned earlier, you’ll find yourself on a moving train, a city ruined by bombing, and even a neighborhood that has you hopping from house to house and yard to yard. All of the buildings and environments make sense structurally often with bathrooms and kitchens full of delicious bread. The level arrangement is well-paced to break up the monotony. After you finish a long level that’s heavy on exploring, you may be treated with a more linear and less challenging level to lighten things up.
Enemy AI unfortunately doesn’t hold up so well. Soldiers are placed in specific positions and don’t even do as much as follow you to the next room sometimes. This reduces the strategic challenge to memorizing enemy positions. Once you’ve played a level several times, you’ll know precisely how to enter the room with your gun at the right level to hit them in the face before they even fire. Other times, soldiers will “see” you through the walls, and you can hear them begin to attack even though you’re several doors away from the room they’re in. In like-fashion, there is also an annoying clipping problem where soldiers have a tendency to poke their guns through certain walls (usually near doors) and attack when you should be safe.
There are a variety of control schemes to choose from, but all are fairly standard for a shooter and all share the same difficulties. Aiming with any precision is a challenge because even slight movements on the C-stick result in jerky movements on-screen. With practice you learn to work with it, but it presents a problem even for experienced players. The other huge frustration is caused by ladders. You just sort of stick to a ladder when you approach it, and getting un-stuck can be a huge pain, sometimes costing you victory and forcing you to restart the level.
Graphically, Medal of Honor is a bit of a mess. Chunky architecture is covered by blurry textures, and the whole game seems to be tainted with a muddy gray color. The framerate is rather choppy, hindering your accuracy at times, and character animations are stiff and nearly look like they could have been pulled from Goldeneye. Outside of door handles being painted on, there is a bright side in the level of detail though. A ton of small objects – bottles, pots and pans, pipes, paintings, toilets – are scattered throughout the environments, amplifying the sense of realism where textures fail.
On the other end of the scale, the audio outperforms. MoH: Frontline won the 2002 Interactive Achievement Awards for Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Composition and Outstanding Achievement in Sound Design. While the graphics may seem rather bland on the opening beach scene, the sound draws you completely into the experience. Guns blazing on every side, bombs pounding the coast, and soldiers yelling out commands all give the player a sense of chaos and urgency. Another nice touch is that as you progress through the game, many of the soldiers will yell random things at you in German. The soundtrack is at the same caliber as a major motion picture and even has a boys’ choir featured on several tracks. You owe it to yourself to turn off the sound effects once in a while and just listen to the songs in their entirety.
Frontline does feature a multiplayer mode, but with games like Timesplitters 2 or Halo to choose from, you’ll likely have a hard time finding anyone willing to play multiplayer Medal of Honor. The truth is the mode is entirely bare bones. There are only five sets of weapons to choose from and no special modes like Capture the Flag or anything. The game gives you a full set of weapons from the start, so it’s a simple matter of seek and destroy which gets old rather quickly.
Medal of Honor: Frontline has some very strong points in its presentation, but in the face of competitors in the genre, it doesn’t stand its ground very well. World War II buffs will certainly enjoy this game, but if you’re looking for a great GameCube shooter, you’ll probably want to look elsewhere.