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Platform:	X360
Genre:	Shooter
Players:	1
Release Date:	August 27, 2007
Rating:

Can the good outweigh the bad in this FPS?

Welcome to another installment in the Medal of Honor series. Here we are Boyd Travers assigned to the 82^nd Airborne Division. We have some new boots, a parachute and some new nifty in-game features but, there are quite a few downfalls to this game as well.

As the title indicates we\'re now a part of the Airborne Division. What does that mean for us? Now instead of simply starting out from a fixed point on land, you have your choice on where to start from. When the level starts you\'ll find yourself with your comrades alongside you in an airplane flying over enemy territory. It isn\'t too long before something happens to your plane and you have to jump. Thankfully, jumping in itself is rather easy. If you don\'t decide to get your ass out of that plane, your buddies will ‘help\' you along by literally pushing out of plane. Once you\'re on your way to meet land you are given a guide via green smoke. Green smoke indicates a "safe" landing area. This ends up being true for the most part of the game, but as you\'ll see in later levels it isn\'t always as safe as it is meant to be. Now you don\'t have to land on the green smoke if you don\'t want to. You can flare your chute to slow your decent and drop in elsewhere. Doing this is like playing Russian roulette though. More times than not I was cut to shreds by waiting enemies. Occasionally I was able to fend them off, regain health and move on. In a level near the end, I was actually able to drop right in on top of one of my objectives and complete it.

Your health is comprised of four bars. Depending on what you take damage from a portion of one of the bars will be reduced. Taking cover for a short period of time will regenerate your health for that one particular bar, not all four.

The weaponry in MOH:A is what you will have played with in the previous installments. The M1 Garand, Thompson machine gun, MP40 and more all make their usual appearances. One of the new features to the game is the ability to upgrade your weapons over time. Each weapon including grenades can be upgraded three times. You\'ll find that some of the upgrades are welcome additions while others you find yourself wishing you would have spent more time upgrading a different weapon. For example; with the Thompson machine gun you\'ll upgrade the amount of recoil and finally the ammo capacity for that weapon. All very welcomed upgrades. With the Springfield sniper rifle, you upgrade your scope, rate of fire and then finally you get a grenade attachment. Yes, a grenade attachment. You get a similar attachment for the M1 Garand on its final upgrade which I did welcome. But a grenade attachment for a sniper rifle I found to be pretty useless.

A transparent image of the weapon you are using is displayed to your right. As you kill enemies the weapon image fills and when it tops off, your weapon gets upgraded. Headshots give a higher rate of experience for your weapon and oddly, melee boosts your experience very quickly. Seems to me to be a bit backwards. Melee should do less while good shooting should earn you more.

Another nice feature was the ability to select your weapon load out in the beginning of the game. By default they give you the optimal weapons for that level, but don\'t always choose the defaults. I found that on numerous occasions it was beneficial to take something else along, like a sniper rifle.

Play control was pretty easy to master. While using your iron sights or scope you can peek around corners and take pot shots at your foes. Holding down the left stick enables you to sprint endlessly. Using sprint is almost a necessity in the final level. Another position that would have been nice to have would have been a prone position. Why give us a sniper rifle and eliminate the ability to go prone for maximum stabilization? The sniper rifle becomes increasingly difficult to use the more zoomed out you go. Minus a prone position or the ability to hold your breath without the slow squeeze and it starts to look like you\'re waving a flag.

MOH:A does a fabulous job increasing the difficulty as you progress through the game. There is a notable difference from each level. As you load each level you\'ll notice a display of enemies and their combat effectiveness. Later levels will introduce more difficult enemies you have to combat. Here is where some glaring Q&A issues start to arise.

Most of the times a headshot does the trick. One shot...one kill. In the later levels you run in to Mr. Badass with a MG-42. I still haven\'t figured out why he is wearing a gas mask, but that is neither here nor there I suppose. Two huge things wrong with this guy. He needs about thirty rounds from an STG44 pumped in to his body before he\'ll fall. Even headshots won\'t take this guy down. I can see they wanted to make him more difficult to kill, but this is just silly. To top it off, when you do finally kill him with a slew of bullets or several grenades, his weapon is never left behind.

Moving on to the AI. To put it simply it\'s a grab bag of both good and bad with more being the latter. Your buddies in arms will do a decent job of taking out the enemies most of the time. There will be instances where they\'ll let them run right past them and on to you. Although they do prove themselves to be useful in certain situations, I found them to be more of a hindrance. Watch as your comrades will run around HUA (Head Up Ass) right in front of you while you\'re emptying a magazine down range. Or how they almost comically appear in the scope right when you\'re about to squeeze the trigger on the Springfield and take someone\'s block off. I kid you not, I was playing last night cooking off a grenade and as I threw it, it hit the back of my buddies head and back towards me. They\'re also fantastic for running in to an area where you just threw a grenade.

Moving on to the enemy\'s AI now. If you thought the sound of the friendly\'s AI sounded bad, wait till you read this.

At times it seems as the enemy is blessed with a sixth sense. That sixth sense is the ability for them to damn near immediately spot you even if you\'re doing a simple peek around the corner. We had a MG-42 firing at me and my entire squad. Plenty ‘o\' targets for him to shoot at. I thought I\'d use a little bit of tactics and move to another location, peek around a corner and snipe him out. Within a half of a second of me peeking out (not even enough time for me to find him in my scope) he was firing a barrage of lead at me. Now this isn\'t with just machine gunners, but with every single enemy in the game. Highly unrealistic and highly annoying. What was more annoying was being on top of what I imagine to be a five story building and having someone lob a stick grenade right up to my location from the ground.

Enemy snipers not only had that coveted sixth sense I was talking about but they also must have a cheat enabled to give them no recoil and no reload times. These snipers would pop off five to six shots in perfect succession right on target, with me being the target.

The Panzerschrek enemies had the same two cheats enabled. Right near the end of the game where they start to appear I had one guy fire off five rockets right towards me with very little reload time on his behalf. Other times the enemy would blindly run at me from the same location making weapon upgrading pretty easy.

The levels of MOH:A are aesthetically pleasing to look at but are not interactive or destructible. It obviously would have been nice to have more in this area. Although each level provides you with a good amount of objectives and gameplay, the overall game itself is rather short. I managed to complete the game on normal difficulty in about eight hours. Besides upgrading the varying weapons, nothing is making me want to go back and play through the game again. I did not play the multiplayer so I cannot comment on that aspect of the game.

I highly enjoy a good FPS and I\'ve always been fond of a good WWII FPS. Medal of Honor: Airborne is a mediocre to good title. The new in game features don\'t compensate for the glaring other issues in my opinion. In closing, I would recommend this as a rental first before considering a purchase.