Reviewed by Barry Little - October 26, 2007

ESRB Rating: M (Mature 17+)

Few military conflicts have captured and secured a sizable and influential place in the gaming industry as WWII. Medal of Honor Allied Assault from gaming juggernaut EA (Electronic Arts) was the first to capitalize on “The Good War” for the PC (with the help of movies like Saving Private Ryan). Now EA is back with another installment—Medal of Honor Airborne. Is this the best Medal of Honor yet? Let’s find out.

Medal of Honor Airborne is the third game of the series for the Windows/PC platform. Medal of Honor Allied Assault was the one that started it all, followed by Medal of Honor Pacific Assault—four, if you count the less-than-spectacular Medal of Honor Allied Assault: Breakthrough expansion pack (additional titles were released for consoles). Each Medal of Honor game places the player in the role of a fictional character participating in actual operations that occurred during WWII. Airborne is no exception. In this Medal of Honor installment, you step into the combat boots of Private Boyd Travers of the Army’s legendary 82^nd Airborne Division.

The game starts with a training session in Kairouan, North Africa in 1943, where you learn the finer points of jumping out of airplane—and surviving. Perform three consecutive jumps while listening to the sage advice of the Jump Master, and you earn either your silver or gold Paratrooper Wings based on how well you did. In Medal of Honor Airborne, jumping into a drop zone is not a scripted event—you’re in full control of where—and how—you land. While in the air, you steer your chute with the movement keys and flare it with the <Spacebar>.

There are three types of landings. You perform a Flared landing if you flare your chute within a safe distance from the ground. Land at a shallow angle with the forward key, and you’ll perform what is known as a Greased landing where you hit the ground running—which can be useful if you find yourself landing near a concentration of enemies and need to haul ass to cover (plus a running target is harder to hit). Fail to flare your chute in time or miscalculate your landing trajectory, and you’ll do a Botched landing. You’ll get up from your hands and knees and stumble around a bit before getting yourself together and arming yourself—obviously not the best kind of landing to do if you happen to drop into the middle of a firefight or near the bad guys.

Undoubtedly, there will probably be more than one occasion in Medal of Honor Airborne where you’ll miss the drop zone and land where you don’t necessarily want to—like in plain-sight of a Nazi patrol, or what you thought was an empty bell tower occupied by an enemy sniper. If you time it just right and perform a melee attack while you’re still in your parachute, you can take an enemy out with kick. Tricky and dangerous—but effective.

Every mission has multiple Drop Zones with Green Signal Smoke popped which indicates the safest landing area (plus crates of health kits and ammo). For the most part, the closer you land to them, the less likely you’ll have to spring into combat as soon as your feet touch the ground. As in most combat situations, the safest approach isn’t always necessarily the best one. There are Skill Drops—key landing locations near the DZ and sometimes, right in the middle of enemy occupied territory that not only can earn you additional points in your stats, but can give you a tactical advantage. It’s easier and more effective fighting from higher ground—or a rooftop. Marked by an unfolded parachute, some are easy to spot from the air, while others aren’t, and can only be discovered through a bit of exploring during a mission.

“But that means I’ll have to jump from the plane again to take advantage of this,” you say. That’s correct. I’ll explain why you’ll also probably get the chance to do so during a mission a little later on, so keep reading…

The Stats & Medal screen back at the Main Menu and between missions is where you can check how you’re performing—number of kills, accuracy with a weapon, etc. Based on a one to five star system and meeting certain criteria, you can earn medals from the Soldier’s Medal to the Distinguished Service Cross, which can only be achieved by earning at least a three-star rating on all the missions at the highest difficulty level. Interestingly enough, the Congressional Medal of Honor which is the nation’s highest military award is mentioned in the Medal of Honor Airborne manual, but absent from the game. There are also three levels of Marksman medals you can earn with each Allied and Axis weapon in the game. Once you’ve graduated jump school, you’ll be taken to your first briefing and your first mission.

Medal of Honor Airborne’s HUD (Heads-up Display) has been streamlined and improved over previous Medal of Honor games. Crosshairs are dynamic and change accordingly based on the currently selected weapon and level of accuracy. Damage and Grenade Indicators let you know from what direction enemy fire is coming from and where enemy grenades have landed relative to your position—needless to say, it can be extremely hazardous to your health if you don’t pay attention to either. A larger, easier-to-read Compass marks the location of friendlies, enemies and the waypoint to current objectives. Since you’ll have multiple objectives during a mission, the arrows that mark each one might be a bit confusing at first. Just pick one and move in its direction—as you get closer to that objective, the waypoint arrow for it will turn into a larger star icon. Stance, Health, Current Weapon/Grenade and Ammo indicators are a bit larger and easier to keep track of without taking up too much of the screen or being a distraction.

The usual staple of American and German WWII side arms, rifles, machine guns, grenades and anti-tank weapons that have been in every Medal of Honor game since the first installment, are back in Airborne, with the addition of a new tank-busting grenade called the Gammon. Also new to this current chapter of Medal of Honor are weapon upgrades that are unlocked and performed in the field when you score enough perfect kills against enemies. All allied and enemy weapons except fixed machine gun emplacements can be upgraded. Upgrades are unlocked in multiple stages, adding additional functionality such as improved accuracy, increased ammo capacity and damage, reduced recoil and reload times.

Whenever you receive an upgrade, the world around you slows down Matrix-style, and blurs for a short period of time as you perform the upgrade and continue whatever it was you were doing—even in the middle of combat. Fortunately, you are temporarily invulnerable to enemy attacks while this is going on. The sequence does look “cool,” though some undoubtedly will find it distracting. Some weapon upgrades take effect immediately when installed. Others must be toggled with the <Alt-Fire> key—like the Grenade Launcher for the M1-Garand.

Combat movement is as good as it gets for a PC shooter, with an additional perk. In Airborne, you can now aim down the iron sights and through the scopes of your weapons above as well as around obstacles, and fire. You can also aim down the sights and fire while walking slowly. Though you are obviously more vulnerable this way, your shots will be more accurate and have a better chance of putting down enemies more quickly, particularly when fighting in tight quarters.

With previous Medal of Honor games, you proceeded in a linear fashion from one objective to the next. In Medal of Honor Airborne, not only do you have the ability to control where you land after your jump, you now have the ability to decide in which order you’ll tackle a mission’s multiple objectives, and which approach to take to those objectives—a welcome first that makes Airborne more enjoyable. Naturally, the game won’t advance you to the next major operation until all objectives in the current one have been successfully completed.

Medal of Honor Airborne uses a checkpoint save-game system. You can perform manual saves, but only of your last completed checkpoint. The interesting—and often frustrating part of Airborne’s checkpoint system, is where and how you restart a level if you die. For the most part, you end up parachuting into your original drop zone again—which means having to make your way back to the last place where you were killed. While not exactly a picnic (especially if you get killed a lot), this wouldn’t be so bad if the enemies in the areas you’ve previously cleaned out were not automatically respawned to fight your way through again—and again. Typical console stuff…

If there’s a silver lining to this, it’s those skill drops I mentioned earlier. No doubt you’ve found more than a few of them during a mission and have memorized their location. Now that you’ve been killed (hopefully not too many times to make you want to toss the game aside), you can try to hit them as you are redeployed from your plane.

Medal of Honor Airborne borrows a page from Call of Duty 2 when it comes to player health. Depending on the difficulty level selected, some of your health slowly regenerates—up to a point—when you’re injured, provided you find cover and disengage from combat. When you start taking a lot of hits, hear yourself gasping for breath and your heart beating, and the screen turns red, it’s time to find some cover or Med Kits ASAP. Though certainly not the most “realistic” it does allow you to focus more on the action and trying to stay out of harm’s way by using cover, as opposed to scrambling for health packs every time you get a scratch or a flesh wound.

Some shooters either have you running around like the proverbial rat in a maze, trying to figure out where to go and what to do next. Or throw brightly lit directional arrows and pointers that make you feel like you’re in Vegas more than the battlefield. Medal of Honor Airborne’s simple and effective compass with its objective waypoints makes it fairly easy to find your way around even during the most chaotic firefight without distracting you with giant, glowing and spinning pinball machine arrows. There are always other squads operating in the mission area assigned to the numerous objectives. If you do lose your way, you can link up with and follow them. You’ll also be advised of any mission updates and new objectives via an allied radio broadcast.

After each mission briefing you’re taken to a screen where you can either accept your default weapons load out or change it. As it has always been in all Medal of Honor games and as a nod towards realism, you can only carry two primary weapons and a pistol, plus five grenades. Some weapons will not be available to you until you have advanced through the game. You can also switch to a different type of weapon (and collect ammo) during a mission by taking it from a fallen comrade—or enemy.

Some weapons can be found in “secret locations.” However, Medal of Honor games have always been about survival—yours, mostly—and not wandering off by to get bushwhacked by a group of enemies who are most likely to spawn in on top of you while you’re out engaging in a console-inspired treasure hunt for secret weapon stashes. Though your squad mates aren’t exactly the brightest bulbs on the battlefield, whatever marginal amount of safety they provide in numbers is certainly better than none at all.

Loading screens in some games often serve no purpose other than to give you something besides a blank screen to stare at while you wait for the level to load. Airborne makes excellent use of the main loading screen for the game’s levels, by providing you with a chart of each type of enemy that not only rates their battle experience and combat effectiveness on a scale of one (the easiest at the beginning of Airborne’s campaigns), to ten (the most formidable and dangerous near the end of the game). They are also shown in uniform so you can easily ID them on sight. The primary and secondary weapons they use are also listed, so you'll know what you're up against when you encounter them. These screens provide valuable battlefield intel for prioritizing threats, while hopefully preventing new players from mistakenly assuming that the same tactics that worked against low-level Blackshirt and Heer infantry will work against elite Waffen and Fallschirmjager troopers.

One thing that hasn’t changed over all the previous Medal of Honor games is the amount of grief the enemy AI can give you, regardless of difficulty setting and whether they are regular or elite enemies. This actually has less to do with their skill—though the AI enemies in Airborne have been improved over the previous games—they now use cover and flank more effectively and even fire blindly from cover when pinned—than the sheer number of foes that are thrown at you at any given time. And of course, the way they often spawn in on you out of nowhere or the most unlikely places to score a quick and cheap kill. Equally frustrating and unchanged is the way they can spot and sometimes shoot you through walls, or score a perfect kill at a range with weapons that clearly aren’t capable of it.

It always took a ridiculous amount of ammo to kill enemies in Medal of Honor games with weapons that have above-average stopping power—even when shot at almost point-blank range. The situation in Airborne has been improved. But not much. Scoring a perfect head shot which can be difficult—but not impossible—will reward you with an instant kill and the sweet sound of a hollow-point piercing a steel helmet (and a brief helmet and bull’s-eye icon that flashes on your HUD), which I found wickedly satisfying. If you think I’m being sadistic (OK, maybe I am, a little), you’ll learn to enjoy it while you can: head shots only work in the game 75% of the time—which is some improvement over the 50% of previous Medal of Honor titles. If you’re new to Medal of Honor, you’ll swear the Nazis have hides of Kevlar and noggins of steel. If not, you’ll probably sigh and think “Here we go again…”

If you’re health is high enough and you’re fast enough, it’s sometimes more efficient to rush an enemy and use the melee attack to bash his face in with your rifle or pistol butt—which will be substituted with a jaw-crushing left hook or a slash to the throat with a bayonet with the appropriate weapon selected. Keep in mind that Boyd Travers is not Jet Li. Running up on a group of Nazis with the intention of handing them an old-school beat-down will usually result in getting yourself shot or clubbed to death by their rifle butts.

Squad AI in Medal of Honor Airborne hasn’t improved much over the earlier games. They follow a set path to the objectives and usually do a passable job of using cover, flanking and engaging the enemy. Once in awhile they’ll even score a kill with a grenade rather that have it bounce back in their faces, killing themselves—and you if you’re unlucky enough to be standing nearby. Sometimes they pin enemies while you flank and take them out. Or distract the enemy’s uncanny and downright unnatural focus on you as if you were the only living, breathing threat on the battlefield (though you may as well be when you get right down to it).

For the most part though they run around yelling and throwing a lot of lead in the air to see what sticks (or drops). Or they charge into enemy fire and get themselves killed. Or mindlessly position themselves and catch you in the crossfire between them, and the Nazis. Or frequently run or duck into your line of fire while you’re trying to shoot an enemy, ultimately getting you killed in the process. In short, it’s Medal of Honor “business as usual.” As always you’re pretty much on your own when the shooting starts. Half-Life 2 and Call of Duty this is not. For what it’s worth, your fellow paratroopers look a lot better and more realistic than they have in any other Medal of Honor game, thanks to EA’s implementation of the new Unreal Engine.

Medal of Honor Airborne’s single player campaign is a short one. It will take roughly 8 to 10 hours to complete the six missions throughout the European theatre, from the Italian village of Adanti, to the heart of Germany in the industrial Ruhr district. Each mission has its own set of objectives varying between search-and destroy operations, rescuing a sniper team, sabotaging munitions and tank factories, securing towns and the infamous Utah Beach by crippling enemy radar and communications. The final mission pits you and your squad of paratroopers against a monstrous anti-aircraft and artillery fortification called “Der Flakturm” whose defenses and defenders must be eliminated before Army Corps Engineers can blow it up.

All of the cut scenes are rendered in-game, with all the drama you’d come to expect from a Medal of Honor title inspired by movies like Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers. Some of most memorable are the ones on the plane before the jump. At the start of one mission, one paratrooper refuses his ticket home after getting injured by shrapnel from anti-aircraft fire, and insists “I’m jumping with you guys!” At the start of another mission, you end up being the only one in the plane left to jump as it’s hammered by AA-fire that punches though the plane as if it were made of cardboard, slaughtering your squad. At the start of another, the cockpit of your plane is literally torn and blown away by AA fire. The look of sheer horror on the face of a fellow paratrooper as he is violently sucked out the gapping maw of the plane like a rag dolls in a tornado, was unforgettable. As was helplessly watching one of your squad rushing to save another wounded soldier lying in the path of an oncoming Panzer tank—only to be gunned down, pinning the soldier he was trying to save—both of them being crushed to death by the tank. Not only do you not only get a real sense of the comradery and bond between these men, but just how frighteningly dangerous being a paratrooper can be, if only briefly through the cut scenes.

The only lull in action in Medal of Honor Airborne is the pre-mission briefings. As soon as you jump from the plane and your boots hit the ground, the firefights between you, your squad and the Nazis are intense and relentless. If any of your squadmates are killed, reinforcements are automatically parachuted in—often, unfortunately, right in the middle of a firefight where they can easily be cut down by enemy fire. Close-quarter house-to-house and building to building combat is fast-paced and harrowing. EA takes Medal of Honor visuals to the next level by utilizing the next-generation Unreal Engine 3. Day or night, the level of detail from the battle-hardened faces of your fellow troops, to the particle effects of smoke, fire, and explosions to the bombed out rubble and debris of small towns and the rustic, industrial look of German supply and logistic yards, there’s no denying that Medal of Honor Airborne is absolutely the most realistic and gorgeous-looking game of the entire franchise, hands-down. Motion blur and camera shake used to simulate running can be one of those things that detract from, rather than add to the gaming experience if not implemented properly. This feature is a first for a Medal of Honor game and I’m pleased to report that it looks pretty damn good.

Unfortunately, the price of using the new Unreal engine is a lack of native antialiasing support in Medal of Honor Airborne. In spite of all the action in the game, the ugly stair-step effect of the game world and everything in it is still noticeable enough to spoil things for those of us who are accustomed to jaggies-free gaming, even at resolutions of 1920 x 1200 (it gets worse at lower resolutions). If you have a NVIDIA GeForce 8000-series NVIDIA or AMD Radeon X1900/X2000-series video card and the absolute latest drivers, your results may vary in using the settings in the driver control panel to force antialiasing in the game.

Many NVIDIA card users have gotten better results by using the excellent nHancer utility to force antialiasing and anisotropic filtering. Although the game looks even more spectacular without those annoying jaggies, forcing antialiasing incurs a noticable performance penalty even on higher-end cards. Since Medal of Honor Airborne is not a DirectX 10 title, there’s really no benefit of running it under Windows Vista—unless you consider a 5-10% hit in performance a benefit. Another issue is that there is no support for SLI or Cross Fire video card configurations.

In what is undoubtedly a bold move for EA, they have avoided using the Havok physics engine used by so many games and have turned to AGEIA—the makers of the PhysX Physics Accelerator Card—to provide the software-based physics-handling chores for Medal of Honor Airborne. While explosions and flying debris and bodies look more convincing, some of the flying body animations are bit too exaggerated, particularly when they’re thrown back from gunfire. A few shots in the chest from my .45 Colt sidearm sent one Nazi flying through a nearby window as if he had been launched from a circus cannon. Some visual anomalies also occurred—bodies twisted at crazy angles and frozen in mid-air. Or limbs stretched out like Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four and getting stuck on nearby walls.

The game comes on a single DVD disc. Thankfully, it looks like 2007 is shaping up to be the year where games shipped on multiple, smaller-capacity CD-ROM discs are heading into extinction. Installation takes 15 minutes or more, depending on the speed of your DVD drive and other factors.

Medal of Honor Airborne’s multiplayer allows you to play either as a member of the Allied Airborne or German Axis forces on EA’s servers. If you want to jump right in and start shooting, there’s Quick Match where you are assigned to the first available game, regardless of your personal preferences. Custom Matches allow you to specify the map, game type and other options that you prefer, then automatically tries to find suitable players base on your criteria. If any of your preferences can’t be met, you get matched with players that come as close to your pre-selected criteria as possible. If you don’t find that arrangement satisfactory, then you can use Create Match to customize the map of your choice, set your criteria for time limits, friendly fire, game type and so on; then wait for players to join and play with and against you. Weapon upgrading from the single-player campaign is available in Airborne’s multiplayer.

There are two Team Deathmatch modes. The regular deathmatch pits the Allied and Axis teams against each other, and the team with the highest score at the end of the time limit, wins. Pretty standard-fare. The same applies to Team Deathmatch Airborne—the only difference is where you begin on the map. Allied forces start from the airdrop, Axis forces on the ground. In Objective, you choose either the Allied or Axis team to join, then fight the opposing team to capture and hold three flags strategically located on the map. Whichever team successfully captures and hold the flags, wins.

A PC game should really have a user-selectable save game system where you can save your progress through the game as frequently (or infrequently) as you choose. In spite of all the attention to detail lavished on the weapons, they lose most of their impact because they sound weak (with the exception of the M1903 Springfield Sniper Rifle).

Sending the player back to the beginning of the level where they must fight and clear out dozens of enemies they’ve previously eliminated just to get back to where they left off, gets to be a real drag after awhile. Earning wings for finding all five skill drop zones per mission as part of EA’s version of “achievement points” doesn’t make it any less of a drag. It’s a time-honored console “feature” that doesn’t belong in a game of this caliber, any more than a certain enemy soldier you’ll eventually encounter in the game who is straight out of the more comic book-oriented Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Personally, if given a choice between the skill drop zones and better friendly and enemy AI, and a longer single-player campaign, I’d choose the latter any day.

Another black-eye for Medal of Honor Airborne was its initial released without a multiplayer server component. Although that's been addressed with a recently released a patch that adds the server component and addresses a few other issues, many people still aren’t happy with the results. Still no word when or if SLI or Cross Fire support will be ever be added to the game—which can’t be going over too well right now for gamers who've invested in one of the dual video card technologies. Rather disappointing when you consider all of the talent and resources at EA’s disposal. Hopefully they’ll set things right soon.

There have been some shooters based on modern conflicts over the years. Some were good, like Vietcong and Close Combat: First to Fight. Some, like Novalogic’s Delta Force franchise, were so-so. And some like Men of Valor and Shellshock: Nam ’67, weren’t so good. But WWII undeniably has had the longest running tour of duty in first-person shooter and other gaming genres.

In less than two weeks from now, Infinity Ward, creaters of the Call of Duty games which have out-classed every Medal of Honor game, will break that tradition with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Infinity Ward is doing more than moving the Call of Duty franchise into a more modern “out-of-today’s headlines” conflict. They’re going for a more cinematic feel with a storyline that focuses on the game’s two main characters that you’ll be playing as—a member of the U.S. Marine Corps’ elite Force Recon and the British SAS. If the recently released demo is any indication, then they’ve definitely got another ground-breaking, kick-ass, award-winning blockbuster on their hands!

In contrast, EA seems less inclined to take chances and try a completely new approach with Medal of Honor. Yes, jumping out of an airplane and upgradable weapons is cool and all, and the Unreal Engine 3 visuals look fabulous in their own “anti-antialiased” sort of way. But AI and other annoyances that have dogged the series since its inception and what seems to be a relentless, cost-cutting march towards turning Medal of Honor into just another console port for the PC, is driving the franchise into a rut.

While undoubtedly the best-looking game of the series and certainly fun to play, Medal of Honor Airborne’s quirks and annoyances held over from previous Medal of Honor games in this day and age will try the patience of all but the most die-hard fan of the series, leaving you with the feeling that it’s long past due for EA to either step up to the competition and make some major changes—or give this once-pioneering WWII shooter some permanent R&R.

Final Score: