Reviewing Every Medal of Honor Game

[Music] foreign video game franchises that have come and gone throughout the years Medal of Honor is definitely one of the most prominent a series which is both responsible for popularizing the World War II genre in gaming and then one that also helped to run it into the ground in the late 2000s looking back on it now though I kind of wonder if new Gamers would still appreciate it the same way that we did all those years ago and I feel like its success is also due in part to the demographic of the people who played it back then you know referring to people around a similar age to me one of the last Generations who had grandparents who actually fought in the second world war my granddad on my mom's side was an engineer in the Air Force ground crew and then my granddad on my dad's side was a Sunderland pilot with the RAF tasked with tracking down in bombing submarines so maybe in some kind of weird way I felt like there was more of a connection there to that time period you know given we had living relatives who'd been through it all either way though this is one of the key game series that kicked off the popularity of the World War II genre and just military Shooters in general without Medal of Honor we definitely wouldn't had Call of Duty and we probably wouldn't have other franchises like Battlefield or brothers in arms so despite where the series ended up it's kinda hard to deny the impact in the influence it had during those early days so why don't we talk about it from 1999 all the way up to 21 years later in 2020. this is the Medal of Honor retrospective trying to join us I guarantee you it'll be a blast right so the first game of the series and the one that kicked the whole thing off was simply titled Medal of Honor released way back in 1999 for the PlayStation exclusively gold 907 had come out two years prior on the Nintendo 64 and really shown the world what console shooters were capable of and although the PlayStation did have some pretty decent Shooters with things like this wrapped up powerslave alien Trilogy and a pretty damn good port at Doom it hadn't quite reached the scope there of what rare was able to pull off but now that was all about to change because Here Comes Medal of Honor a World War II themed shooter developed by Dreamworks interactive even having direct involvement from Steven Spielberg himself heavily influenced by what the guy did with Saving Private Ryan along with experiences he'd had watching his son play goldeneyeon the game introduces OSS operative Jimmy Patterson who is to the Medal of Honor series what Sonic the Hedgehog was to Sega the silent protagonist should take control of as you fought back against the Germans yeah or several hundred of them the game being on a CD meant that it could also take advantage of the extra stored space allowing for actual footage from World War II which they've worked into the many briefing screens throughout hundreds of German new boats were launched to hunt in their deadly wolf packs now I'm not sure if I'd call it a run and gun shooter it's more of like a standing gun shooter because aside from just firing from the hip the game has a much more precise aiming mode with the Crosshair which is what you'll spend most of the time using the only thing is you're gonna have to be standing still to use it it's kind of similar to the manual aiming in Goldeneye only here it's kinda mandatory because you often can't hit Jack's [ __ ] without it you can change a control scheme to support the use of both thumbsticks which makes the whole thing instantly playable in the current year and part two of what I think makes it still stand up in a lot of ways weapons involve pistols rifles machine guns and one of the better shotguns in all of gaming and regardless of the weapon manual aiming is really the way to go here as you'd expect for a military shooter the enemy lineup is pretty simple mostly just being soldiers armed with similar weapons as the player that means no Kaka demons no lost souls or Pig cops even by today's standards though the AI for these guys is surprisingly smart even though they're just mostly stand still and shoot at you you'll also see them ducking left and right they'll Crouch or go prone to make themselves harder to hit and if you throw a grenade at them they'll run away from it or maybe even kick it back which is kind of impressive to watch plus they'll return the favor frequently throwing their own grenades which is often pretty hard to see if they clip to the floor I do think we kind of take motion captured animations for granted these days and going back and replaying something like this reminds me of a time when all of this stuff was done by hand that means you have all of these really exaggerated over-the-top animations even the way they fall to the ground or stagger when shot feels more animated than it needs to be but then again that's also part of the game's charm even something as simple as being able to shoot the helmet off someone's head or watch them get back to their feet after cashing a bullet is just brimming with soul plus two I've always loved the animations for the NPCs when you're showing them your papers the way they've raised their hand to their chin to emphasize that they're processing information your pieces are in order and of course the way they do that Infamous salute can I help you find where you are going sir even the main menu was memorable with it being said in that iconic war room and these polygonal characters walking around in the background doing things arbitrarily to look busy as for the gameplay well the campaign's broken up into eight missions and each Mission has a bunch of objectives you're gonna need to complete most of which involve shooting people Lord just blowing stuff up stealth missions do offer up a nice alternative and these involve sneaking around undercover along with showing your credentials to every Goose stepping [ __ ] who stops you in your tracks who's your commanding officer and overall it's still a mostly solid little campaign though it does start to get a bit cheap near the end when you come up against guys armed with STG 44s and other soldiers arm with rocket launchers thankfully though when they fire those it's kind of like they're shooting them in slow motion but all it takes is one hit here and you're killed and have to restart the entire Mission from scratch yeah this comes before the common decency of Mid Mission checkpoints was like a standard thing so expect some frustrating restarts what also really sells the whole package here is the music the soundtrack and that main theme was composed by Michael giaccino who went on to do music for Pixar Marvel films and even recently working on Batman as a result the whole thing feels much more epic and cinematic making the missions feel Larger than Life not to mention more memorable I mean that little Motif that's used for the Germans that just keeps popping up is something that's still burned into my brain foreign [Music] plus it also has phenomenal sound work the second mission in the game has you escaping through the sewers and as you're moving through this dark network of tunnels you can hear whistles being blown German soldiers shouting and dogs barking off in the distance as you're being hunted down the weapons all sound pretty great too capturing the more realistic and true to life aspect that they're trying to go for and about all they bug it up is that you can reload the M1 Garand at any time as opposed to having to empty the entire clip beforehand in hearing that iconic ping keep in mind though this is when the gaming demographic was mostly comprised of kids and teenagers not 30 something year old man children who've never fired a gun in their life and based all of their weapon expertise of what they read on Wikipedia playing it now in 2022 I do think it's a bit of a product of its time and playing it again for this video it does remind me that you're playing something made back in 1999. but I think regardless it's still a pretty damn good game man that really sent the Benchmark for countless Shooters it followed and it is really one of the first of its kind for that military shoot genre I think the only other World War II theme first person shooter we'd had before this was World War II GI which ran on the build engine but that thing felt more like a total conversion for Duke Nukem 3D than its own thing not to mention it felt like [ __ ] Medal of Honor however laid the foundation for what would follow in in a lot of ways everything that came out afterwards was just kind of building upon what they'd created with this first iteration your papers are in order now they didn't really wait too long here to capitalize on its popularity releasing the sequel Medal of Honor underground barely a year later in 2000. yeah man back at a time when developers could make an entire game in a span of about 12 months in underground you're playing as French Resistance member Manon Batiste who actually popped up a fair bit in the first game only this time there's an entire campaign focused on her it's actually a pretty big moment for the FPS genre 2 here with Manon being one of the earliest examples of a female protagonist and one that even the NPCs in the game acknowledge at times pretty badass one too man going up against the Germans and almost single-handedly [ __ ] up their entire operations on a global scale I'd rather hear both sides of the tails foreign to the first game showing how Manon initially started working with the OSS prior to that she was just carrying out solo missions for the resistance with her brother in Paris before this guy got killed when an operation went wrong the second mission had you escaping through the catacombs after his death which is not only awesome but one of the many environments here based off Real World locations also it's the first time you get to use the Sten SMG one of underground's many new weapons and there's just something so fun here about mowing down Germans with a gun that's made out of like 10 bucks worth of materials after that though you're working with the OSS for the rest of the campaign given your orders from the same Co that gave Jimmy his which brings us to the subject of your next assignment and you'll start to see that underground really is about as close to a perfect sequel as you could ever really want and the reason for that is because it just builds upon what made the first game so good I mean for starters visually the game has much more variety getting outside of Europe and going to other countries like Africa and Greece even just the backdrop of the Paris catacombs sticks out amongst the median villagers and forests you explored in the first game missions are also often much more action-packed throwing way more enemies at you during combat making the whole thing more challenging but also more exciting I mean damn dog it's only three missions in and you're already blowing up tanks with a Panzer Shrek you'll visit locations like Casablanca and Crete is a crate or Crete and at one point it's like you're playing Wolfenstein 3D or something going through these Eerie German castles collecting Nazi relics along with shooting a bunch of guys wearing suits of armor for one Mission you're escorting a captain as he releases pows and then during a later Mission you're riding shotgun in a motorbike shooting at passing Soldiers with a machine gun the final mission event takes place during the liberation of Paris in 1944 as the resistance makes a final stand against the Germans you'll see actual Paris landmarks too like Notre Dame the Eiffel Tower and even Moulin Rouge for one part of this Mission there's not even any music just the distant diegetic sound of a lady singing in German coming out of a radio along with the ambience of nearby shootouts echoing throughout the empty city streets it's just a Vibe and it's a really good example of an old game working within the limitations of a platform but still pulling off this really cool atmosphere now I already mentioned one of the new weapons is that Sten submachine gun but then there's also a crossbow and my personal favorite the stg-44 hands down one of my all-time favorite World War II guns and a much better alternative to the bar and that tiny ass 20 round magazine yeah when you're absolutely positively got to execute every [ __ ] in the room except no substitutes apart from that you've also got a petrol bomb because nothing screams guerrilla warfare more than throwing a glass bottle full of Highly flammable liquid at the troops of a totalitarian military force [ __ ] man say that sentence five times fast they've also expanded upon the stealth sections from the first game this time you go undercover as a photographer even able to use that camera to take photographs of the Germans who'll often strike these fancy poses which is pretty funny to watch them the campaign comes to an end with a level set on a train the best kind of levels where you cause two oncoming trains to collide with each other on the same track which is a pretty cool way to end the whole thing but the most memorable thing about the whole experience is its final epilogue which has you playing as Jimmy Patterson again in a spin-off mission that as you're going into a mysterious Castle to investigate these top secret experiments this involves getting through three challenging levels where you'll take on Dancing German Shepherds armed with machine guns along with guys in suits of armor zombies that explode and then for the final level life-sized nutcrackers can't make this [ __ ] up the goal of these three levels is to find the components to craft something called the panzanaka which is your very own weaponized Nutcracker that's gonna help you make your Escape but let me see if I've got this straight right your plan is to break into this place to find the components to build something to help you escape makes sense but you know what the whole thing is just so cheesy and tongue-in-cheek that you can almost Overlook just how dumb it is it's a perfect light-hearted way here to wrap the whole thing up plus also giving you a serious little funnel challenge you to punch through overall Medal of Honor underground was a great swan song for this series on the PlayStation and all of these years later still one of the best for the platform hands down no no that can't be said about the Game Boy Advance version and I guess it'd be remiss of me to not mention this Abomination at least once [Music] and yay I'm kind of jumping ahead a bit here to late 2002 but it is worth mentioning if only to get the whole thing out of the way nice and early man live on an underground for the Game Boy Advance might honestly be the worst FPS game I think I've ever played and I suppose you could say it's impressive they got the whole thing running on a Game Boy that's kind of negated when you consider how awful it is to actually play through it kind of encapsulates the phrase just because you can doesn't mean you should it actually follows the mission structure of the PlayStation version Pretty closely beginning with Manon and her brother in Paris along with that whole escape sequence through the catacombs before she then starts working for the OSS it even has those missions undercover with the film camera killing German archaeologists and finding all these relics but the whole thing is just so incredibly unfun due to how the whole thing looks and plays and I mean just looking at it in motion should be evidence enough here but let me elaborate the starters let's talk about how the enemy Sprites are barely distinguishable from the background and look at the weapon Sprites too and how basic they are looking at the whole thing from a distance it's like staring into a magic eye puzzle that you just can't solve keep your eyes unfocused there [Music] oh yeah as for the gameplay well you don't do much more here than just hold down the shoot button on that small gathering of pixels which are supposed to be enemy soldiers until you hear their death rattle and is it me or are these guys saying sounds good when you shoot them I mean listen to this and tell me if I'm going crazy or not good feels good as for their music well that is also pretty awful and a bit of an insult to the Game Boy sound chip [Music] [Applause] but if you want to go a bit deeper just compare this thing to other Game Boy ports something like Wolfenstein 3D Duke Nukem or doom and then consider the ports of almost 10 year old games somehow looks runs and play better than this does what's even worse though is that this doesn't even have the common decency to get itself over with quickly yeah man it's like a four or so hour long game and most of that time will just be spent trying to navigate the environment finally consider that this was also a full price game as well I mean just let that sink in yeah imagine charging that kind of money for something that's more or less a goddamn slideshow in fact you know what I take that back that's a bit of an insult to slideshows [Music] the most shocking part is that this thing was developed by Rebellion who of course worked on the Sniper Elite Series along with some other pretty solid Shooters like Judge Dredd vs death and the AVP games so this thing is a bit of a painful pixelated blip on what was otherwise a damn solid portfolio however that wasn't the final game we got for the Game Boy Advance because after this in 2003 again yeah jumping ahead we got Medal of Honor infiltrator but whereas underground failed as a crappy attempt at a first person shooter infiltrator succeeds at being a pretty damn good top-down shooter yeah I can't believe I'm saying this but I actually like this [Music] I mean check it out man they've even managed to include those briefing screens even though I'm guessing it's not much more than animated gifs along with having a low quality rendition of the theme tune and actual music during the missions that won't make your ears or your ass bleed [Music] foreign what you've got here is a pretty fun little shooter with a vertically scrolling environments and a bunch of mission objectives to complete even starting off with its very own Beach Landing almost like the kind of thing you'd expect to see back in the day on new grounds you can shoot in eight different directions to take out enemies and holding down the right shoulder buttons gonna lock you in that direction allowing you to essentially strafe left and right there's different weapon loadouts with the Thompson submachine gun the bar rifle and the M1 Garand which I think is by far the best and they've even managed to work in some stealth sequences where you can choose to stay out of the enemy's line of sight and sneak up behind them for a bunch of takedowns combined with these really fun intermissions inside a first person perspective shooting at [ __ ] with a machine gun and unlimited ammo which kind of reminds me of old arcade Shooters like operation wolf foreign ly Charming pixel art in the same vein as the metal slug games you even get to hop into a tank a few times and drive around blowing stuff up and running people over [Music] it's actually a pretty astute comparison to make two considering that like the metal slug games infiltrator is often ball crushingly hard you know as in It's Gonna crush your balls but along with being able to save your progress and there being a bunch of unlockables and side objectives to complete I feel like the difficulty just adds to that replayability factor making this something that you actually want replay compared to underground where I'd rather have my [ __ ] hairs plucked out with a scorpion bar so if underground was a disappointing entree for the series first entry on a handheld platform well then infiltrator was like the satisfying main course yeah good [ __ ] good job right so at this point we're going to jump back to 2002 when the series finally made its way to the PC but more importantly the sixth generation consoles with two games coming out in close proximity these being Medal of Honor Allied assault and then met levona front line and while Frontline on the consoles feels like a successor to the first two games our light assault on the PC is a little bit different and much more run and Gun this time you're not playing his Jimmy Patterson either it's Mike Powell as opposed to playing as Mike Roch or Mike Hunt this version was developed by 2005 ink whose only other real notable credit apart from Allah sold is the expansion pack for sin I think most people would say that Allied assault is one or if not the best game in the series and while I'm not entirely sure I agree with that I do think if nothing else it's the most accessible and it is still highly playable on PC the campaign starts up pretty slowly here with a boring escort Quest at night time which just seems to go on and on then there's a bit of a difficulty Spike with the second mission when you go undercover in Norway to still Intel and destroy a German U-boat [Music] what I find increasingly more annoying here though every time I play through this thing is the flinching when you get shot at and this might be the worst example of it I've ever seen in an FPS game and that kind of brings me on to my main criticism Allied assault has the enemy count and the player Health pullover run and gun shooter but then weirdly enough it has the movement speed the reload and the weapon swap time of a tactical shooter it's just missing the most important tactical shooter elements like being able to lean and go prone yet don't ever get me started on the pathetic jumping height that means it's kind of like this weird mix of gameplay elements from The Pride games combined with the faster paced shooting elements from other Shooters at the time most notably returned to Castle Wolfenstein which came out a year prior and it's kind of like the developers just couldn't decide what kind of game they were making [Music] the AI seems to Teeter between being completely oblivious to then having actual intelligence which means you'll see them do things like ignoring live grenades for instance but then on the other hand you'll see them doing things like jumping on one to protect their buddies I don't know I guess my point now is that playing it in 2023 it's not really going to be worth it for the gameplay alone instead I think Outlet assault is only really memorable now for three main reasons firstly the d-dag mission which along with the one in front line was really one of the first times we've ever had this sequence recreated in a video game the ignoring of course World War II GI which everyone should undoubtedly influenced by that opening scene in Saving Private Ryan it's again this incredibly intense set piece where you're one of the many poor souls here sent to Normandy only to be greeted by Machine Gun nests that barely lets you get your toes wet let alone make your way up the beach and complete your objective and it still serves its purpose as being this insanely hard mission where it's almost kind of blatant in how crushing they're making it probably to kind of highlight how impossible the situation really would have been for those guys in real life I still remember playing this mission on my dad's computer for the first time and really thinking that this was the best yes that video again Graphics whatever you can get by today's standards it does kind of look dated but the sound design I think still really holds up and the explosions and gunfire combined with having your orders bucked at you from your commanding officer makes this whole sequence super visceral and overwhelming covering fire it also runs on the quake-free engine which felt a lot like it was the go-to engine for Shooters at the time much in the same way that everyone seems to jump onto the Unreal Engine nowadays without having a [ __ ] clue in how to make that engine not look and run like total [ __ ] so yeah dog if you're playing Allied assault for this Mission alone well you're not going to be disappointed second thing which makes Allied assault so memorable is sniper town which is one of the best and the worst levels in the entire game I say it's the best level because again like the D-Day one it just has this insane atmosphere forcing you to move through a sniper-infested village with a tank crew in the middle of a heavy rainstorm Shutters on the Windows bang loudly against the buildings planes periodically fly over you in the midst of these unseen dogfights and the rain and Thunders like this ever-present obstruction making it even more difficult to make out the would-be Assassins hiding off the distance it's just a master class in sound design and ambience but then it's also the worst Mission because of just how irritating it is to get through and it ain't really a mission based off skill that's more a mission about just knowing where all of these [ __ ] are hiding as a rule of thumb the snipers in the game are always just complete Pricks and they always put these guys in really well hidden spots which yeah get it it makes sense they're snipers but it's kind of frustrating from a gameplay perspective when you don't know where they are or where you're getting hit from there's one earlier in the game who's hiding behind a bunch of trees and you literally cannot see him like at all so dealing with one sniper can be a headache so yeah imagine being in an entire Village that's teeming with them this level right here is the reason that safe scumming exists and although I finished this game probably like a dozen times I still struggle with this Mission and I always forget where at least one or two of these [ __ ] are hiding then finally the third reason Allied assault is memorable uh barrels yeah that's right son you heard me barrels barrels which when you shoot dynamically leak oil depending on the point you shoot the man you still see people pointing this out on the internet even decades later and yeah it's a cool little piece of tech in a game that's otherwise set in a world where every object may as well be made out of concrete [Music] I still do think Outlet assault is a decent game and the inclusion of all those stealth missions is again a pretty cool addition it even has a bit of a throwback to Medal of Honor Underground when you get to meet up with Manon again you didn't have too much trouble getting here I hope but I think usually playing it now though is that everything it does Call of Duty does better the First Call of Duty in 2003 was even worked on by people who formally worked on the Medal of Honor games who then splint it off like a splinter and formed Infinity Ward and everything that introduced the Call of Duty series would completely surpass everything that Medal of Honor had done up until that point with new control options like leaning left and right or aiming down sides but then more than that just making the missions way more exciting and adding in more NPCs to heighten the feeling of being in an actual War you know instead of just being a one-man Army mail of Honor really sticking to its guns in having you play as American soldiers was also part of its biggest downfall Call of Duty on the other hand lets you play as pommies Russians Canadians and even polish soldiers so while light assault might still have a couple of memorable missions Call of Duty has like half a dozen of them they did work on two expansion packs here eventually with spearhead and breakthrough and yeah both of these are still pretty damn good but they don't really expand too much upon the basic Loop of the base game Allied assault is just one of those unfortunate titles that came out during that period where PC shooters were really on the cusp of making that next big leap and it really does kind of suffer for it front line on the other hand was released in 2002 and developed Again by Dreamworks after they got bought out by Electronic Arts and became EA Los Angeles and this right here is the true sequel to the first game letting you play once again as Sunny Patterson back again doing what he does best we can definitely say that this guy's good at his job he's better than good he's a [ __ ] liability front line often incorrectly gets labeled as just being the same as Allied assault but on consoles and this couldn't be further from the truth because outside of them both having their own D-Day missions they're completely different games in Allied assault D-Day wasn't until about an hour or so into the game but in front line it's the opening Mission which to be honest is really what Allied assault should have done too plus I'd even argue in some ways that this one is almost better than the PC version for starters it's way more more cinematic having this really chilling sequence at the beginning when Jimmy gets knocked underwater and sees the floating corpses of his Squad mates getting torn up by machine gun bullets some of the other effects like the explosions and the water I also think look better on the console despite the lower texture resolution and the image Clarity but more than that I think the stakes just feel higher because you have to do the whole thing in one go yeah because unlike the PC there's no quick saves and this is still one of those console games where you don't get a single checkpoint and you expected to finish entire levels without dying it's not too bad for the rest of the game but storming the beaches of Normandy without dying is a pretty tall order get over here a later Mission has you sneaking around a town at night time disabling a bunch of German vehicles then driving to the next area and repeating it again multiple times and then after you've done all of that you have to sneak into a bar full of German soldiers and start a bar fight not exactly like a train spotting bar fight either yes apparently a bar fight just means a minimum of two people punching each other but look my point is that having to do all of this in a single sitting is definitely a bit of a challenge and the length of some of these missions is much longer than the original games making Frontline I think one of the tougher entries in the series funnily enough though I think the hardest live in the game is actually one of the shortest where you have to make your way through this armored train bottlenecked into being shot at from a singular Direction plus being stalked from the other side of the tracks by pursuing Carriage that's on for the cannon [Music] that's not to say it's a bad campaign though in fact it's actually kind of shocking how well this one still holds up with smooth controls and visuals that are still pretty decent considering the time it came out once again you're better off using manual aim when shooting and going for the headshots and the enemies still show off some pretty clever AI again picking up and throwing back grenades [Music] there are times though when they'll just stand around like idiots but most of the time they're reactive and show off the kind of clunky exaggerated movements which can only come from handmade animations The increased power of the sixth generation consoles removes the really limited draw distance as well making for some better looking environments though it does lack the variety that medal of an underground had for some reason too they removed the war room as the main menu which is just downright sacrilegious one thing I did kind of appreciate though was being able to see actual civilians during missions which adds a much more realistic element to the game you almost kind of forget that there were millions of people's lives affected during the war and coming across all of these poor Farmers being intimidated by German soldiers or having a burst into the kitchen have a room full of defenseless women kind of reminds you with that I think my main issue with Frontline is just the lack of stealth sections the first few games had these really fun stealth levels where you spend all of that time sneaking around undetected here though I think there's like two stealth areas in the entire game and for both of them almost right after using your forged papers your cover is instantly blown what if I must coach the best sneaking around felt like a big component to what being an OSS operative was about so to have the whole thing down played here just feels like a massive step backwards they also [ __ ] up the shotgun in this thing big time and that's a damn shame dog considering how good it was in the last few games why won't you die otherwise though there's not really that much here default with Frontline and it definitely Justified the purchase of a PlayStation 2 a GameCube or an Xbox back in the day that's for damn sure hopefully Xbox because that's the platform this thing seems to run the best on now this was one of the last video games that I ever got to play with my dad he's not Not Dead by the way but I remember him giving up after dying on that D-Day mission for the 20th time and I think he had started to realize that games were getting to that point where we had to start putting some serious effort into learning how to play them despite it filtering mild man though Frontline is one of the best of the sixth generation Shooters and if you're only gonna check out one game in this entire list well this is the one if only to see how many times you get your ass handed to you on the beaches of Normandy he's a [ __ ] liability after this there were another two games made which dealt with a similar theme with Medal of Honor Rising Sun and Pacific Assault and much in the same way as Frontline and Allied assault tried to recreate that Infamous speech landing at Normandy Rising Sun on the consoles and Pacific Assault on the PC try to recreate the attack on Pearl Harbor this time too we're finally out of Europe and thrusted to the Pacific War in locations like Hawaii the Philippines Singapore and Burma now I still remember seeing the Michael Bay Pearl Harbor movie in cinemas with my mates before this game came out so you can bet your bottom dollar that I was pretty damn excited to actually get to play this with my own hands and as it should be that's how Rising Sun kicks off with you playing as Corporal Joe Griffin in the bowels of the USS California as it's under attack by the Imperial Navy on that Infamous day you make a desperate scramble to reach the surface putting out fires and helping your buddies before you finally get topside and witness what's definitely one of the more memorable moments in the entire series seeing this slowed down slice of pure pandemonium as you see the true extent and Devastation of the assault yeah man gone are the dreary streets of Paris or the secluded roadways of some French Village you're now outside in broad daylight the sky blackened with smoke and the deafening sound of approaching aircraft overhead combined with thunderous gunfire it's about as far removed visually from the previous games as you could ever possibly get and for an opening Mission it's kinda hard to fault foreign kinda plays its hand a bit too soon here and the missions that come after this are kind of anticlimactic because right after this you're in the streets of some Village off in the Philippines armed with an M1 Garand in a Thompson submachine gun shooting indiscriminate looking enemies off in the distance eventually moving through so many jungle environments that you somehow managed to contract malaria in real life still though it does bring some pretty notable improvements to the gameplay one being the inclusion of a dedicated grenade throwing button which is actually a god-tier new edition and then weirdly something they removed for every game afterwards but more than that being able to actually save your progress during missions and this alone makes the game way less frustrating because you don't have to replay in time missions from scratch anymore it also adds in new weapons in the form of a Sten submachine gun a silenced pistol along with the other kind of weapons you'd expect to see in the Pacific Theater so sadly no STG 44s or mp40s a big criticism you used to always hear about this one was how the game looked worse than Frontline and I gotta say I don't think that's entirely true I think the issue there is that most people only remember those first few missions after Pearl Harbor which all take place in the jungle at night time and yeah that ain't doing the game any favors it also came out at a point where I just don't think they'd really nailed how to properly render jungles in video games yet especially in 3D engines this came out a few months before the first Far Cry did which would really Pioneer the way that jungle environments looked in video games not to mention setting a really high Benchmark with lots of dense foliage and dynamic lighting making you feel like you were really right there under the tree race swatting mosquitoes away Rising Sun is a console only game which means it's working within console engine limitations and yeah these starting areas just don't look very good the short view distance is probably done to try to make the area seem more imposing but it just makes it look muted flat however it's not all that bad and later on when you start moving through those jungle environments during the daytime there is some pretty good looking locations kind of impressive too had that steered away from just copy pasting the same looking trees and grass over and over some of the other environments also look really good like the ones where you're inside all of these Burmese temples with these accurately modeled Buddha statues is really impressive there's even a nice attention to detail here with those statues having had all the gold chipped off them and this is something that actually went down at the time with the Japanese soldiers salvaging whatever they could find apparently the dev team went to all these places in real life to study these locations as much as possible and you know keep them feeling true to life and I think that's one of the aspects that really gets carried over into the gameplay there are some other standouts in the campaign too like watching someone get eaten by an alligator later on you get into the back of a talk talk when you're in Singapore which almost immediately crashes and final thing too is that that's how most talk-took rides in real life end up as well yeah in a horrific crash that nearly kills everyone involved you also get to team up with Aussie soldiers at one point and that is just hilarious I mean coming across Australians in video games is so rare you have to savor every instance you saw your mates land up ahead come with us we'll take it here that's a bloody outrage it is the one and only stealth mission in the game involves you sneaking into this hotel undercover as a German officer and this is pretty awesome too ending in the meeting you're infiltrating being ambushed by your body who burst through a glass ceiling foreign even later on there's a whole mission centered around The Bridge on the River Kwai involving you having to blow the damn thing up along with having to ride on the back of a goddamn elephant that's kitted out with machine guns so yeah dare anyone to say that there's nothing memorable about all of this so whilst it might have one of the lowest aggregate review scores out of every game in the entire franchise I just think that's because it had to follow Frontline and the expectations that that thing said I appreciate the change in tone in the premise not to mention the very distinct Japanese soldiers as the new enemy faction those Bonsai charges are [ __ ] real and it's kind of terrifying to think that those guys did that in real life with complete disregard for their own personal safety that's a bloody hell right it is now Pacific Assault much like our load assault was exclusive to the PC and it's actually one of the few times that Michael giaccino did into the music with someone named Christopher Lennox doing it instead creating this really emotive and poignant Fame to replace the series iconic Anthem they've even brought back the war room as the main menu I mean kind of it's like a makeshift camp on a beach somewhere but you know what I'll take it I'll take it turn out Pacific Assault is also in one of the few games in the series to try to actually tell an overarching story with you playing as a guy named Thomas conlon and the narrative trying to develop the relationships he has between the other guys in his Squad Jimmy Sullivan's a corpsman from Illinois who dropped out of med school to joined the Navy I get the feeling he comes from money but none of that matters where we are and all of that would be fine except this game probably came out a bit too early for that kind of thing to be believable I remember asking the recruitment officer what's the deal with you guys I swear to God he looked right through me and he said deal we're Marines son and we deal in lead oh this is terrible facial animations weren't entirely at the point yet where they were possible at least not in this engine anyway and they've clearly not motion captured the other animations either which is fine but it means you get these very wooden cinematics which don't really sell the tone or the mood they're trying to go for it's been a long time since I've seen a face like that she's real pretty man the whole tutorial section of the game is a flashback to when Tommy was at boot camp and is the expected dye tribe of this drill sergeant shouting at you and calling you names like Dirtbag and maggot because apparently every boot camp level in a video game has to copy Full Metal Jacket am I right only it lacks all the kind of dialogue that made those scenes so memorable I mean the drill instructor in Pacific Assault has a speech that goes on for like two minutes and it is just awful in the beginning was God all else was Darkness so God created the heavens and my Earth not really helped by the cringy reaction shots of Conlin and his buddies God was not happy supposed to make you become more attached to these guys I guess but they never died during missions anyway outside of scripted moments so I just never really get two shits about any of them but what really makes specific assault kind of weird is how it's this odd mix of like a tactical shooter and a more casual one this means you've got mechanics like leaning left and right along with aiming down sights which is the first time this was introduced into the series single fire weapons in the game are kind of flat out awful because of the reload time making the semi-automatic weapons just far more useful then there's the option to give your squad basic orders like advancing retreating regrouping or laying down suppressive fire none of which really seem to matter though because these guys are joined at the hip to Colin anyway so you never really need to worry about them but by far the worst mechanic is how the healing works now Pacific Assault all but does away with medkits and those magical water canteens from the previous games so your main way to stay alive here is by having the squad medic Jimmy rush over and fix you up on the Fly that's as simple as pressing a button on the keyboard at which point this guy will ideally beeline straight towards you and instead of being outright killed when your health is knocked off there's a chance he can get you and revive you if you're knocked down but it's all just kinda crappy I got a few more and I'm out buddy the starters the healing animation is really slow but Jimmy even throwing up during this animation early on throwing up so much that it's amazing it hasn't passed out from dehydration secondly though half the time you've just get killed Jimmy doesn't even manage to get you before you're killed by a nearby Japanese soldier when this happens you just kind of sit there staring at the abyss slowly creeping in around you hoping this guy's gonna make it only to see a nearby enemy come up and finish you off before he even has the chance I do think it's kind of a neat idea how the further you get into the game the more efficient he becomes but it's just a slow clunky mechanic and there's a reason why no other game in the series has ever done this want to know why because it sucks Pacific Assault also much like rising sun takes its own bayonet stab at the Pearl Harbor attack this version starts off with you getting a tour of the base from another officer introducing you to all of these random people that you'll never meet again but doing a good job of establishing how many people were stationed on the base that day rest of the areas mostly the submarine base now those bubbles has got to keep to themselves you know it's being cooped up like that all the time then the attack happens and you're just trying to make it to a nearby gunship avoiding all of these planes doing strafing runs you'll have to again move around inside a sinking ship trying to rescue your fellow Marines followed by again getting top side shooting down approaching planes before another sequence in a gunship similar to the console version where you shoot down yet again a bunch more enemy planes overall though it's a pretty intense Mission and reminds you just how catastrophic that this event was it's also arguably one of the most important events because this attack essentially instigated what we now refer to as World War II but again after that much like Rising Sun you'll just spend most of the time here going through jungles swamps and more jungles trading shots with Japanese soldiers who pretty much just blend into the background with mission objectives being little more than just moving forward and shooting enemies you know among a few others like this lift Willy and like Rising Sun it also makes the same mistake kicking off with a jungle level set in the middle of the goddamn night but you couldn't even see your own dick if you wanted to stop to take a piss I do think visually this game still looks pretty good though and the jungle air is during the daytime perfectly encapsulate what I was talking about earlier with Rising Sun how they've managed to pull off a believable and dense jungle environment the water effects still look great and you've even got Dynamic lighting coming in from the trees casting Shadows across your hands and your weapon as it's filtered through the leaves it also makes those Bonsai charges even more harrowing because you often can't see these guys until they're really bearing down on you I guess your only question is like how long can you shoot the same looking enemies in the same looking jungle before it just starts to get boring that's kind of the issue with both of these games is that outside of the Pearl Harbor attack there's not really that many well-known battles that took place in the Pacific Theater certainly not as notable anyway as Pearl Harbor unless of course you're the kind of person who's really into World War II history and knows every single engagement about halfway through the game they try to recreate the battle of the ridge which was a two-day long assault from the Japanese as the US tried to defend an Airfield and that might sound good on paper but in a video game all you're really doing is shooting the same looking people over and over in the same small patch of jungle and it's doubly crappy here because it seems you're the only person actually killing anyone kind of shows too how these large-scale missions in war games only really work if the AIS lending a helping hand if you are the only person doing something then it just turns you into the one-man Army single-handedly repelling an entire assault and completely removing the realistic angle they're trying to take in the first place during this sequence it's common to see your allies overrun because these guys couldn't even hold the line against a handful of enemies and you'll have to jump out of whatever hole you're hiding in to help them repeatedly someday you will tell your sons how you fought with courage at a place called bloody Ridge I'm sure they'll refer to it as bloody Ridge five minutes after the battle's over sure God bless the car I will say one thing though and that's the Pacific Assault doesn't have a level where you're having to go through some error that's been infested with snipers because you know they could have easily put that kind of level in it would have been an absolute nightmare like sniper town if it ever contracted jungle fever and AIDS at the same time so just thank God that they had the mercy to not include a sequence like that instead they included a level that's a complete genre shift putting you in a plane and throwing you into dogfights with the Japanese because you're apparently Conlin's also an expert pilot this playing controls exactly how to expect a plane to control when it's flown by someone who has bugger World experience and it's by far the worst mission in the entire game at one point you need to bomb these enemy ships and all that made me want to do is Bomb The House of the person who designed this [ __ ] overall Pacific Assault kind of feels like it was trying to experiment with where to take this series from that point on kind of making it a bit of a black sheet for the franchise I do think there's a reason why EA literally gave this game away for free though so if you do want to play it well at least you're not wasting anything aside from your time which come on we both know it's worthless but it is the last time we're going to be on the PC for three or so years and where things go from here is what marks the beginning of the end for the series because what came after Pacific Assault is what I like to call the creatively bankrupt period for the Medal of Honor franchise and we got a bunch of games between 2005 and 2007. most of which just didn't do anything all that different or exciting I mean the World War II genre was fully established by this point with Call of Duty Brothers in armed and the Company of Heroes series not too far off either so to say that we were starting to get World War II fatigue is a bit of an understatement and the games that followed for the medal of honest series was European salt Heroes 1 and 2 Vanguard and then Airborne all set during the second world war those sons of [ __ ] the first one was European Assault coming out in 2005 for the Xbox the PS2 and the GameCube with four campaigns to play through in France North Africa Belgium and then even the Soviet Union yeah this one breaks new ground and being the first time in the series you get to go to Russia with two whole missions set in style and Grant even best girl Manon shows up later in the game when you have to rescue her from a farmhouse making it the first time she's been seen in any of these games since Frontline come on let's go apart from that though it's a pretty forgettable experience playing as a completely interchangeable character named William Holt as he Regals us with stories about his escapades during the war the gameplay feels like it's taken a few pointers from Pacific Assault focusing more on cover-based shooting leaning left and right and hiding behind waist high objects in fact early on your flat out told to stay behind cover and not play this as a run and gun shooter and the controls do work pretty well in that way becoming almost essential to survive you get Med kits which restore a portion of your health but also player revives which are earned by completing Main and side objectives side objectives being things like finding Intel killing high-ranked German officers or destroying extra assets so it almost encourages you to complete these side tasks to make sure you've got a Fighting Chance and it all sounds good right you know almost like a bit of a throwback to the earlier games where you had to take your time and use precise aim trading shots back and forth with the opposition only it doesn't really work that well because enemies don't seem to play by the same rules this is a semi-tactical game with a really fast time to kill only someone didn't tell the enemies that and these guys move around like they're playing Quake 3 Arena I mean damn dog you die so quickly here that those revives almost become mandatory to make it through those tougher missions to make the shooting even more odd the pickups for health and ammo are these Giant floating icons that look like something out of a completely different game I mean the dumbest thing too is how those icons vanish if you don't get them fast enough and that just promotes the complete opposite of how you've been taught to play the game because you have to play aggressive to get to these in time but this is also the same game where playing aggressively gets you killed so yeah great idea [ __ ] it means you'll be scrimping by on ammo quite a lot here and I don't know if that was by Design to make you really have to work for every kill but the high enemy camp sure doesn't lead me to believe that nah man I think the truth is just someone [ __ ] up there to make it even weirder there's an adrenaline mechanic where you can go invincible and get like infinite ammo for 10 or so seconds which is about as far removed from tactical shooting as you can possibly get so overall it's like a weird mix of different elements that just don't quite gel the worst thing they are your teammates though who do absolutely nothing to help you out and only get in the way constantly hello imagine the resistance members from the cd17 chapters in Half-Life 2 and then double that annoyance factor and you're almost there just thank God there's no friendly fire in this game or it would have been court-martialed before I even finished the prologue they're supposed to be able to help out during combat you can even send them to a specific location or call them back in neither of which though up all that useful the other issue is that the a button is bound to multiple actions here it's bound to reloading it's bound to interacting with stuff but it's also bound to heal your teammates using one of your available medkits so yeah take it guess what happens when you're trying to reload or activate something when these idiots are constantly running in front of you on a positive note there is some pretty good ride to the missions here with all the various areas you travel to and it does look decent for a console game from that error I gotta say to him a sucker for a level set in the snow when this game has some pretty good look at snow levels other than that though this one really has nothing going for it and its short length which comes in at around four hours is probably the best thing about it I'm likely to respect a subpart game if it at least has consideration for my time so yeah I can't fault it in that regard now after this we're going handheld again with Medal of Honor Heroes one and two on the PSP [ __ ] now after this we're going handheld again with the Medal of Honor Heroes one and two on the PSP both of which are more or less just European Assault heavily stripped back to work within the limitations of a gaming platform you can play on the toilet Heroes one was developed by Team Fusion and I cannot find any information about these guys online with Heroes 2 again being developed by EA Los Angeles the heroes in the title coming from the fact that you're playing as protagonist from some of the previous games this is the file for Sergeant John Baker he's a recent OSS recruit currently serving in Italy as part of operation Avalanche and eventually even Jimmy Patterson himself he's a [ __ ] liability the first game is broken down into five missions split across the three campaigns for each character with again a bunch of Main and side objectives to complete the side objectives involving just finding some kind of document that's got a giant icon above it yeah not super hard to complete or likely to make your brain explode but look if nothing else it makes more than just running around the levels in autopilot mode foreign game it does seem kind of unfair to criticize how this whole thing looks but what I can do is criticize just how repetitive the missions are most of these feel like you're playing a domination map where you've got to hold and capture all these various points around the environment you're quite literally just stand in one spot until you've captured a point before they're running off to the next one and doing it all over again and they recycle this Mission format about seven or eight times throughout the entire game I mean this kind of mode is fine for a multiplayer experience but in a single player campaign it just feels so unwholesome other times you might need to hold a single point and this is as simple as just standing in one spot for like five or so minutes until a timer in the top right of the screen fills up and I think it'll be more fun at this point standing outside and watching dog turds Drive there's also just not that much variety to the weapons and ninety percent of the time here you'll be either using the Thompson or the MP40 a couple of times you get an M1 Garand or a bar but that's about it and yeah I get that they're Staples of the genre but it's like where's the STG 44 the car 98k or the Enfield rifle visually again there is variety and actually think some of the later missions look really good you know especially the ones set in snow Yeah surprise surprise but it's a super short game like roughly two or so hours long and I just can't think of any reason why you'd want to play this unless you've got like a two hour car ride to sit through we'll need to take a two hour long [ __ ] but honestly if you're taking two hour long shits well you might want to go and see it doctor Heroes too on the other hand is really just more the same only this time instead of being split up between three characters in different countries you're just playing as one guy the entire time named John Berg did you hand in your assignment Mr Bird yeah with nine missions instead of fifteen probably the biggest change with this one is the regenerating Health which is the first time they've ever used that mechanic in the series and I swear too man that developers think putting a generating Health in video games gives them free reign to just make things as irritating as possible and Heroes 2 is just full of these [ __ ] sequences where you get gunned down so quickly sometimes you can literally see the enemy spawning right in front of you like some ancient Cosmic deities throwing them into your dimension to upset the fabric of reality or something the one consolation here is that they have included Mid Mission checkpoints which reduces the [ __ ] I made it from like an eight down to a six or a seven but again there's just not that much variety to any of the Gunplay you'll have your hands glued to an MP40 or a Thompson most of the time both of which have frustratingly slow reload times it also has an mj-42 which I think might have the worst bullet spread I've ever seen in any video game I mean it's like I'm shooting a goddamn water sprinkler along with the slowest turning artillery gun in the history of well everything I mean I think it'd actually be faster rotate an artillery gun in real life the biggest fault both these games have though isn't even really their fault and that's the PSP itself now look it's a scientific fact that console Shooters work best with through thumbsticks but anyone who knows the PSP layout knows you only get one thumbstick this means while you can use the thumbstick to move around you've got to use the face buttons to turn left and right and aim up and down and it's just a super clunky control scheme in an already super clunky game Sony eventually learned their lesson with the VDOT years later but this game is a testament to how that control scheme just doesn't work so overall not amazing games and not particularly fun or smooth to control but I guess some would accept that we're considering the platform they were built for are they bad no would I recommend them again no how about that all completely changes if you're playing Heroes 2 on the Wii fix up for us a version which was released a few months after the PSP and in comparison is like playing a completely different game I'd actually heard about this version before I'd even played it on the PSP with a bunch of people telling me that this was the worst game in the entire series but after having finished it I just have to ask those people what were they smoking because as far as I'm concerned like I thought this was one of the better ones not only does it look considerably better on the Wii running at 480p that rhymes but it also plays a lot smoother running around 60 FPS most of the time and just feeling seamless with the Wii controller they removed the sprinting mechanic from the PSP version but instead increased your base movement speed making the whole thing feel less lethargic it's also one of those rare Wii games that manager to use the gimmick of the control setup properly making you perform movements that make sense for what you're trying to do so for instance when front a machine gun you have to use two hands to aim it around you know as if you're actually using your hands to grab both handles when firing the Bazooka you put the motion controller over your shoulder like an actual bazooka and that awful section rotating that artillery gun is now way better because you can spin the gun much quicker if you rotate the nunchuck faster even something as simple as the sniper scope has you rotating the controller left or right as if you're adjusting the zoom ring on the side of the scope when throwing grenades you get a helpful marker which shows exactly where the grenade is going to land making this whole thing just effortless and that's super handy considering foam grenades in these kind of games has often felt like cold [ __ ] it just shows you how actually thinking about how to work in the controls for the mechanics of a game like this can have a huge impact on how the whole thing plays and yeah right keep that statement in mind for when we talk about Vanguard later on the best inclusion though is a new weapon in the form of a shotgun and this thing the two or three times you get it tears absolute ass and look if you're gonna do one thing right in a first person shooter it's making damn sure that the shotgun turns the player into an absolute force of nature speaking of the weapons too this version lets you carry two prime weapons whereas on the PSP you could only carry one in a sidearm but I think the best addition is being able to play through the entire campaign in an on Rails mode like you're playing a coin sucking arcade version of the same game now you can use the controller like a light gun to aim around the screen and shoot at enemies along with shooting at mad kits to restore your health points and this whole mode actually works pretty well the Wii actually had some really solid rail Shooters and this mode is a cool addition to what I think is an underappreciated genre for the platform about all they messed up here was that with the Australian version of the game EA didn't include a multiplayer mode the belief there apparently was that it was because Aussie servers wouldn't have been cost effective or something so they just didn't bother and yeah imagine that right EA [ __ ] up the multiplayer component for one of their games that's a first they'll sarcasm by the way e e e e all in all this just feels like the best way to play the game and it kind of makes the PSP version redundant [Music] you'll still get your ass handed to you in nanoseconds because they still haven't really cracked how to address the broken enemy damage but damn dog this is a Far Side better than the original version and something I actively wanted to play through however that all Pals in comparison to what came next with the men Le Bonner Vanguard which is really just a crappier version of airborne and again that was developed for the Wii and then oddly an outright irrelevant platform at that point with a dwindling PlayStation 2. you have to keep in mind that this one came out when the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 were a thing and for a game to come out on the PS2 at that point and not even the Gamecube or the Xbox is just a downright Oddity plus we're 10 something games in now and it's another entry in a series which really hasn't had any kind of innovation since its Inception in Vanguard you're playing as Sergeant Frank Keegan a member of the 82nd Airborne Division though you'd hardly know it because this guy jumps out of a grand total of three planes in the entire game and you'll be taking part in some pretty pivotal campaigns though all of which were also featured in Airborne with operation husky Neptune Market Garden and varsity you get very little control though over where you land during these sections and although they do look interesting and impressive visually you'll come to realize that once you land it's more or less just the same old [ __ ] and the fact this game looks worse off than its predecessor makes the whole thing even more depressing what's kind of wild to me too is that somehow the PS2 version looks better than the Wii version does which it really shouldn't considering the weight technically has more power under that little white Hood I do think some of the lighting effects look kind of neat in certain areas but for a 2007 game to look like this is just insulting it's actually a good example of why I hate the technological complacency that Nintendo has with their consoles and a full price game looking like this you know the same year the PS3 and the 360 are on the scene is really a step backwards you know what I mean like people paid money to play this that's it best batteries ours that Wii version might have had some Merit too playing with the nunchuck and the motion controller only the game controls like complete [ __ ] and it doesn't feel like any thoughts gone into it at all I mean for instance to reload guns you move the nunchuck to the right like to the right stay to the right but then to do a quick 180 spin you move the nunchuck to the left and half the time I ended up spinning around by accident when I was trying to reload because of how inconsistent this is it's actually a good follow-up to the point I made earlier when I was talking about Heroes 2 and that's how like a little common sense when integrating the controls into a game like this can have a huge impact though in vanguard's defense it did come out before Heroes 2 did so at least as a consolation they seem to learn from their past mistakes so opting to play it on the PS2 with that dual shock controller you're just gonna find a mechanically dated and clunky shooter that often feels worse to play than even the previous games in the series just kind of feels like the whole thing has input delay and even with a new Sprint button it's like you're walking around with an amble in your pants the whole time 99 of the gun play here is just trading shots with enemies you hide behind cover the whole time and what's most annoying is how again ammo and weapons disappear from corpses if you don't pick them up quickly enough and I just don't get why they've done this again [ __ ] Wolfenstein 3D man back in 1992 had the capabilities to let weapon and ammo pickups remain so why can't a game like this manage at 15 something years later you know if you can answer that question please enlighten me you want to know what this results in yeah you guessed it again bugger all ammo so it's another campaign where it's like there's some kind of bullet shortage and you have to make sure every shot counts honestly I'd be fine with this if the combats seemed to facilitate it but you're still playing the part of the one man army and a one-man Army who's running low on ammo that ain't a fun title to have honestly just grab that MP40 as soon as you can and sit on that thing for the entire campaign it'll be about as boring as watching snails [ __ ] but at least you'll have ammo for the damn thing checkpoints are also incredibly inconsistent and it's again a lot like Heroes one and two where you get gunned down in seconds which means you'll be replaying large sections over and over there's this half [ __ ] mechanic of being able to upgrade your weapons giving the Thompson a drum mag for instance but you can only upgrade the Thompson and the M1 and these upgrades are only available in a handful of levels plus they don't even carry over to ensuing missions okay but the worst thing by far is yet again your buddies and yeah I know I'm sounding like a broken record here but these guys still get in your way constantly and obscure your vision hello and they always take cover in the kind of spots where you want to take cover and it's impossible to get them to move either overall it's just not a very enjoyable game to play through and I think I'd have more fun being waterboarded with cat piss there is a reason why this is one of the lowest scored games in the entire Series so if you're one of those poor souls who unwrap this thing for Christmas or an ill-fated birthday look I know it's not that much all these years later but let me give you my condolences because I can only imagine the amount of effort it took to feign happiness when you realize you've been gifted this piece of [ __ ] you got me oh oh yeah all I can say is thank God the middle of on an Airborne came out that same year to salvage what little credibility the series still had left because Vanguard could have easily been the final sad nail in the coffin otherwise Airborne was released in late 2007 and it's Unique for a couple of key reasons firstly it marks the first console generation leap that the series has had in almost a decade with it being released for the 7th generation consoles and it's really the kind of game that could have only come out at that point in the industry on an engine like Unreal Engine 3 because not only does that allow for a much more cinematic presentation but it also allows for bigger capabilities when it comes to the size of these environments working in 10 with the whole premise of being a paratrooper jumping out of a plane and landing on the ground in real time oh yeah and that's the second thing right being able to jump out of a plane at the beginning of each Mission actually jump out of a plane and choose where to land and in what ordered attack your objectives it's like the culmination of every mechanic the series has had up until this point or combine into one neat little package plus it also gets rid of straight up regenerating Health using a combination of fixed and regenerating forcing you to work within the limitations of Med kits to make the game more tactical and less about sprinting around like a [ __ ] chicken the whole thing opens with this training Mission as you're being told the basics of parachuting and one of the very first things you see is this large expansive Airfield where dozens if not hundreds of other paratroopers are also in training it's a stunning backdrop and almost like a bit of a flex by the devs I think to Showcase just how much more of a grand scale this game's on this time you're playing as boy Travers and each Mission begins with you and your body's inside a plane which often gets shot to [ __ ] before you then just thrown out under incredible duress and forced to quickly get your bearings once you make your ideally grease Landing you're off on your way and then completing the mission taking part in some of the more notable operations from that era probably the coolest thing I think is how I can now essentially level up all of the weapons by getting kills with a gun you're basically earning XP and eventually you can unlock three upgrades for every single gun in the game from something as simple as a bigger magazine for the Thompson or a grenade launcher attachment for the rifles it encourages experimenting with all the different weapons and prevents you from just sitting on the M1 or the MP40 the entire time the best by far here again I think is the stg-44 and this might be one of my favorite versions of it in in-game when fully upgraded it gets improved accuracy faster rate low times and a tactical scope I mean damn this game along with Vanguard also marked the return of Michael giaccino composing the music and compared to the other games which just kind of felt like he was using the same motifs and tracks over and over Airborne really does feel like it's doing its own thing the first track in the game is easily one of the most memorable and definitely makes that opening sequence that much more impressive it just captures the feeling of heroism and courage in a series that's been lacking that for a long time vertical envelopment troopers death from above one of my favorite things was those short little segments of radio chatting you've got in between the next mission and just something as simple as hearing banter that doesn't feel forced at some much needed charm into a franchise that was really on its last legs no sound confident one thing about the Nazis [Music] he's right you know I think the main issue this one has is that it starts to detour away from historical accuracy towards the end of the campaign and feeling more like you're playing a Wolfenstein game instead of Medal of Honor enemies in the game are given a combat rating from 1 to 10 with one being pretty much useless and then 10 being Death on Two Legs the lower level enemies are disguised armed with mp40s or stg-44s you know the kind of thing you're probably used to by that point they'll throw grenades they'll Retreat one under Fire you know basic stuff like that but then the final couple of enemies you come up against are guys wearing gas masks are with rocker launchers and hip firing mg42s like it's nothing in fact there's guys with the mj-42 can survive multiple headshots and it all kind of reminds me of the Venom troopers from return to Castle Wolfenstein just feels a little bit out of place in this series the final mission is set inside a flat Tower which were these giant imposing structures that the Nazis built to defend cities like Berlin and yeah I know they're historically accurate as in you know they existed in real life but the size and scale are the ones in the game feel like something that have been greatly exaggerated to make them more grandiose and epic for the sake of the gameplay that's all fine and dandy I mean I have no problem with that but yeah it's quite a bit different to slowly moving through the French Countryside with a Springfield rifle isn't it it's also a really short game probably one of the shortest in the franchise coming in at around three or so hours which you know probably didn't help its reception either but you know what I'd still take a tightly crafted three to four hour long campaign over like a seven eight hour long one and besides you can only shoot so many people in the face with an M1 Garen before it does start to become a bit repetitive kind of like how imagine this video is starting to feel by this point [Music] the [ __ ] is that overall I think Airborne is a solid shooter and it's probably my favorite in the entire series not to mention it's the one that marked the end of the World War II era for the franchise and that's not really by choice see they're more just the way the industry was moving at the time and a big reason for that was a game that came out that same year yeah Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare you might have heard of it and if there was a more decisive title that marked the end of the World War II genre for first person shooters well I can't think of it he's right you know more than that it's also a turning point for every other military FPS game being set in modern or near future settings from that point on in the Medal of Honor series we try to keep up with this trend with a bit of a reboot for the series with Medal of Honor yeah just Medal of Honor and then Medal of Honor War fighter in 2012 getting you out of Europe in the Pacific Theater and putting you into a modern day setting in Afghanistan playing a special forces soldiers and fighting the Taliban for the first game you're mostly playing as a Navy SEAL member called rabbit yeah rabbit it really helps the whole power fantasy element when you're playing as a highly trained soldier named after a cute and fluffy rodent [ __ ] you the thing is though this game kind of came out a couple years too late for its own good this is the kind of game that really would have done a lot better had it come out in the mid 2000s because that would have made it smack bang in the middle of the Bush Administration when the war in the Middle East against the Taliban was still really at the Forefront of relevancy but by 2010 Barack Obama had become president and that whole premise of fighting insurgents in deserts and caves in the Middle East just seemed kinda dated I mean by that point we'd had Modern Warfare one and two and they'd even tried to shake things up a bit with Black Ops by going back to the 1960s plus that same year we had Metro 2033 Fallout New Vegas and even things like Raven software Singularity so a game about just shooting Middle Eastern terrorists even though that was new for the series was on the other hand just kind of behind the times then by the time Warfighter rolled around a couple of years laid up it's even worse what's not helping either is that Medal of Honor takes its story very seriously there's not really any room for light-hearted humor or levity it's this oddly intense Journey jumping back and forth between these various characters Colonel you're not hearing me and I want to be very clear on this point I am giving you 24 hours to get our forces into that Valley so nobody cares and it's all just kinda mindless As you move through these highly linear levels shooting the same looking enemies over and over with whatever assault rifle the game's given you seems they couldn't decide they wanted to make the shooting tactical or run and guns so they've opted for both so you can lean left and right Crouch and go prone but then leave behind the kind of Body Count you'd expect to see in an old action movie from the 1980s but then annoyingly you still get dropped like a bag of [ __ ] if you so much as look in the general direction of nearby gunfire to keep things interesting Medal of Honor takes a page out of Call of Duty's Playbook and swaps between all these characters constantly it even has one mission where you're the pilot of an Apache chopper blowing up more tar teams and shooting dudes as they come running out of caves and look I guess on that note it's not all bad like there are some cool moments here and there One mission has you hunkering down inside a stone Hut that's being slowly Blown Away by these constantly approaching enemy forces and eventually during this whole sequence your squad basically accepts their fate and comes to grips with a realization that they're probably going to be overrun and killed level one six we are we aren't gonna make it we're out of ammo and the enemy is closing in it's a grim and hopeless moment capturing how futile they're walking up and be but yeah of course you saved in the nick of time as air support shows up and just scorches the Earth otherwise it's just a campaign that you practically played in autopilot running around shooting bad guys as they pop up from behind buildings like Targets in a carnival Shooting Gallery there's never any further running out of ammo either because you can just Dash your squad mates for more ammo at any time it comes from that era where the player isn't allowed to interact with anything until they're given the go-ahead that means other people have to open doors for you or pull you up Ledges because yeah apparently a special forces Soldier can't even lift his own body weight and again the whole thing is super short coming in at around three or so hours about the best thing it has going for it is the visuals with some really good looking environments effects and lighting it's kind of funny to me too how the campaign runs in a really early iteration of the unreal engineer three and yet I'd argue that it looks better than most Unreal Engine 4 games we get in the current day the only problem is that fov which is super low and if there's one thing I can't stand aside from chemical warfare and Tick-Tock thoughts it's low fovs let me tell you what's kind of cool though is that the music was composed by the same guy who did the music for among other things the first Iron Man film and the theme for Game of Thrones but it all just feels like a bit of a play-by-play of what they thought they needed to do to compete with the popularity of the Call of Duty series it's kind of sad man that a franchise which really helped pioneered a military shooter genre is now desperately just trying to stay relevant the sequence where you first use your night vision goggles for the first time is the classic example knocking out the power and then going through this pitch black building like your Buffalo building taking out these incapacitated enemies it's exactly the same as a similar level that Modern War Fair had three years prior by the time Warfighter came out two years later in 2012 at that point the whole thing was like Weekend at Bernie's hauling around the carcass of a dead franchise to try to pretend it still has some life left playing through warfighters campaign again for this video has to be just one of the most boring experiences I've had in recent memory and my main takeaway is that out of all the video games ever made I can definitely confirm that Warfighter is one of them what the [ __ ] once again you're trying to stop the Taliban this time from smuggling High quantities of a super potent explosive called pent and seeing as they killed off rabbit in the previous game Sorry spoilers you're now playing as preacher one of the other members of that original Squad and along with the central story involving the terrorists they've shoehorned in this lame side plot about preacher's strange relationship with his wife and daughter can I just say right here and now how much I [ __ ] hate this Trope it always seems to be for characters in these kind of roles as well like whenever someone's a detective or a soldier or doing some kind of a job that benefits the general population it's like they always have to include some unsympathetic spouse on the sidelines who puts their own personal issues above the greater good I mean yeah let's totally ignore the incredible sacrifice this guy is making because he didn't make it home that one time to cook dinner or wash the dishes and how does his daughter somehow look both 12 and 70 years old at the same time [Music] God damn apart from some unintentionally laughable moments here the story is also just completely forgettable the English [ __ ] we know you're speaking [ __ ] do you speak it just kind of exists to explain why you're going from point A to point B on a positive note though this is one of the earliest games to use dice's frostbite engine and it still definitely holds up in that regard in fact I think even by today's standards there's environments here that just look amazing the lighting in some of these areas is just gorgeous and there's some fantastic environmental effects as well one mission is set in the Philippines during some kind of world-ending monsoon and this whole area just looks amazing did I say amazing before the trees all sway violently in the wind you're dealing with this raging torrent of flood water and all these buildings and structures seem to crumble around you there's a car chase through Pakistan where you're crashing through Market stores and narrowly avoiding oncoming traffic and this just looks insane especially considering it came out in 2012. yeah lots of space in this mall and then a later Mission Again featuring a car chase in Dubai perfectly captures the grossly decadent backdrop of that City yeah it's a damn good-looking game man and it scales really well for Modern Hardware it's just a shame that the rest of the game plays so boring to the point that it could curate insomnia I mean this really is about a soulless as a shooter can ever get with a combat Loop being little more than just running around shooting people hiding if you're injured and then just repeating until the whole thing comes to an end the cover system does work pretty well I will admit but there's really nothing exciting about it in any other way Angel does sit on whatever assault rifle the mission gives you for 90 of the campaign and again because they still haven't decided what kind of game they want to make you get mode down in nanoseconds by enemy gunfire there's a new door breaching system where you can choose how you want to enter certain rooms from like half a dozen or so different options but this is really just for show because it doesn't even seem to matter which one you go with the end result is always the same so yeah what a piss-up ultimately this is the game that really killed off the middle of on a franchise and from this point on EA put all of their chips onto the battlefield series which now to make us all feel even older has now also kind of run its course too regardless of how things ended up though Medal of Honor still has its place in the industry and was still one of the most influential franchises of all time some people look back fondly on their campaigns for others it was the multiplayer either way though these games have had a profound effect on countless lives about the years for me I'll always remember sitting on the computer in my dad's office making my way up the beach in LA to Salt or the first time I loaded up front line for my PS2 I still got the occasional itch to go back and mow down Germans with a Sten submachine gun in underground and I also often want to jump out of a plane with an M1 Garand in Airborne now I'm aware I'm skipping out on Medal of Honor above and beyond but lately VR games have made me want to buff up the entire contents of my stomach so maybe that's something for a future video plus as far as I've been told that game's also pretty damn awful and we've got enough of those kind of games in this video to begin with he's right you know folks might not talk about every game lovingly in the same way but they'll talk about them regardless and for a franchise to still have relevancy going on two decades later is a testament to the impact that it had on all of us nothing else still the only games that let you shoot German Shepherd's arm with assault rifles or ride an elephant that's decked out with machine guns [Music] [Music] thank you

Channel: GmanLives

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Id: m8atIu6VwiM

Length: 81min 33sec (4893 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 28 2022