Medal of Honor: Airborne Reader Review

Guidelines

There are a couple of things you need to know before playing this game.

Don't play the game on the hard difficulty. Don't pay attention to where the AI is aiming. Don't assume that a Nazi soldier with a rocket launcher won't have a better aim than you with a sniper rifle. Don't assume that the rocket launcher won't fire more rapidly than your sniper rifle. Don't let the seemingly free missions fool you from thinking that this game will be different from other Medal of Honor games. And if you did play it on hard get used to seeing the loading screen and jumping from the airplane a lot.

Story? Screw that

There is a story in this game. You're an American paratrooper and you and your airborne friends are saving the world from the Nazi threat. You also have a name and you should pay attention to when your comrades call out your name because that is when they'll do a suicide rush into the gunfire of the Germans.

Unique Selling Point

But that's not important, the important thing is the innovative feature of actually being dropped from an airplane at the start of each mission and being able to land wherever you want (well within limits as you are falling quite quickly) on the map. This gives the game a less linear feeling that's been the biggest fault with these world war 2 shooters. On each map you'll have a couple of objectives that you need to take care of and it's up to you in which order you do them. But taking care of each objective is a linear affair and after you've taken care of the 3 'free' objectives there is usually a 'funnel' where you are forced to move for 1 or 2 checkpoints onward. This is an interesting approach and does make the game more interesting.

But

If you are playing this game on the hard difficulty you will very soon start to hate the lack of quick saves and regular check pointing as you will have to jumps over and over again and if you die in one of the funnel ending checkpoints (which you will) you will most likely get stuck for a while because they are usually the toughest parts of the mission and if you've taken the wrong equipment (never drop that sniper rifle...) you'll be forced to play over and over again.

Why?

Because the AI is terrible. The AI will see through floor boards and shoot impossible angles (and sometimes through walls) and it doesn't matter what kind of weapon they are using. It can be a MG42 or a rocket launcher, they will hit you. They will be more precise than you can be with a sniper rifle. Oh and you cannot trust where the AI is aiming because the bullets will always go towards your direction if they have started firing at you, meaning that they can be aiming the other way and kill you. Time and time again.

But that's not all, the navigation system for the AI is a happy random mess. As you enter new sections the AI will be running on paths to get to their predesigned watch areas and they will run right through you as they do. With a game as free as MOHA that only serves to enlarge the problems with the AI. There is also a constant respawn system so that you can never trust that the area that you cleared for the last objective will be clear when you next parachute in.

But there's also a big problem with the checkpoint system, it doesn't save the locations of the weapons you might have changed to earlier in the mission and if you for some reason get stuck with a shotgun and a automatic rifle when you could really use a sniper rifle there is no way to get it unless you restart the mission.... from the start... because it doesn't give you a list of checkpoints to start from.

Conclusion

A mediocre shooter with an unique selling point and good production values that suffer from the implementation and not enough new features.