Medal of Honor: Warfighter review

 I don't know if it was hubris or just bad luck that Medal of Honor: Warfighter was released just a few weeks ahead of Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 but when you read EA's press release claiming that MoHW is "this year's only true modern military experience", you have to suspect it was probably the former.

I notice the absence of the word 'original' in this description and once you start playing the game it becomes obvious why. Let's start with the campaign. A terrorist group is threatening to cause untold mass destruction on innocent lives and it's the job of our brave elite military boys to follow the chain of command back to the ultimate villain and save Western civilisation as we know it.

Sound familiar?

Along the way, you will play as different members of your squad, pilot boats, call in air-strikes, shoot down helicopters, strafe bad guys from helicopters, steer robots and rescue hostages. Hmmmm, nothing new there then.

So in order to mix things up a bit, Danger Close have included lengthy cut scenes that follow the emotional marital rollercoaster that the main warrior Preacher is going through when trying to balance keeping Western civilisation safe with staying home safe with his wife and daughter. Great if you're making a movie but not great if you want to get back to the business of shooting hordes of terrorists in the face.

Spec Ops: The Line managed the difficult feat of throwing in some moral ambiguity without dropping the pace in the action but Medal of Honor: Warfighter seems caught between making a movie and an action game and failing.



The one truly promising innovation in the gameplay is the breach menu which offers you increasingly varied ways of bashing a door down if you manage a decent number of headshots when you barge in. Yet the whole exercise is ultimately pointless as however you break in, the scenario is exactly the same - maybe someone more imaginative could take this up and run with it.

A similar issue happens in multiplayer where at the beginning you can choose to fight in the uniforms of half a dozen countries. All very patriotic but even when you've customised your weaponry, all the partcipants still look relatively the same.



There are a couple of interludes where you indulge in 'Mafia' style car race-'n'-ram chases but in most other respects, the single-player is standard cover-shoot-sprint fare. As for the mush vaunted realism, yes, the sounds and locations by and large do have a ring of authenticity about them but the AI combat tactics are highly predictable. Also, there's no danger of you running out of ammo as long as you have a squaddie nearby to keep feeding you top-ups and this means that the game lacks the one vital ingredient for this genre - nerve-jangling adrenaline.

The campaign is also very short at little more than 3-5 hours max - and where are the meaty rewards and achievements? In the end, Medal of Honor: Warfighter is just a short burst of semi-realistic target practice before the main CoD war kicks in.


Score: 2.5/5