Medal of Honor: Heroes 2 Comments by Kristan Reed

Oh. Only 5?

Gutted. IGN's review was remakably positive and I had high hopes for this. Oh well, maybe I will have to go for Umbrella Chronicles to keep my Wii Zapper dutifully employed.

Christ, my eyes just burst looking at those screenies.

First-person shooters are really not the Wii's forte really...

God, that looks poor!

another Wii must have!!

First-person shooters are really not the Wii's forte really...

Metroid Prime 3 begs to differ...

A lot of the US sites liked this game - didn't expect to see the score that low.

Wiilol.

IGNlol.

Sayinglollol.

makes me wonder how the wii is selling so many consoles with scores like this.

I doubt many people are buying the Wii to play Medal Of Hono-missing u-r

First-person shooters are really not the Wii's forte really...

I'm pretty sure this review does indicate that it works very well on Wii; the issue is lazy by-the-numbers design.

So it plays really well but is a boring HoH game?

Pffft, we don't need this, we've got Wii fit.

The other major difference is that ammo is unlimited, and so is health; so instead of the usual recharging system, you have to shoot health-packs scattered around to top up your health bar...

Should that be limited?

Since the US seems obsessed with WW2 is it any surprise that it scored well over there?

what a shame, I really thought this would score higher, based on the US reviews.
I think it got an average of 75 on metacritic.

Hmm, I may still give this a go. I quite fancy some souless 'light-gun' arcade action.
And would love to see some promise in the online options....

@FenderMaster - Yes, Metriod Prime 3 is excellent but it's the exception rather than the rule and it isn't really a FPS as such, more like a first-person adventure-cum-platformer-cum-shooter!!! LOL

First-person shooters are really not the Wii's forte really...

metroid prime 3 was amazing, controlled so well that i find it really clunky going back to 2 stick fps's with a normal joypad now. surely someone else must be able to make a decent wii fps? any others on the horizon?

"Next to ageing titles like Frontlines and European Assault, it feels soulless, hastily cobbled together and depressingly formulaic. In its favour, the controls are very solid, and the game has enough polish to drag it into the realms of mindless playability, but that's not nearly enough to mask the insipid level design, sloppy AI and all-round feeling of contractual apathy surrounding this thoroughly mediocre effort."

So to summarise: All that stands between this title and an 8+ score are HD graphics... ;)

ah but is metroid prime an fps?

not really. but it controls like one...

too bad, seems as it is not always so pleasent to be a wii owner. Seems as a outstanding person, that you always have a 50/50 chance to get a shitty game delivered. How do you feel about that?

alas, a pity

Since the US seems obsessed with WW2 is it any surprise that it scored well over there?

It has an average score on Game Rankings of 77%. Not bad, but not great either.

Good thing Eurogamer's around to show us the way, though!

to the next whisky bar ?

@bitesize

Totally with you on that. Played The Orange Box recently and loved it to bits, but after MP3 the controls felt so clunky. Someone must be working on a decent FPS for Wii, shirley?

Again, disappointing...the US reception to this was surprisingly good, and, whilst I was never fussed about getting it or anything, a good score for this would at least demonstrate that third-parties were starting to get a handle on the hardware. Alas, no...ah well.

Fairly predictable these Wii scores.

Yowser, just looked at those screenshots. Reminded me of Rise of the Triad with the distinct lack of colour and, well, quality.

Wii WWII

HAHAH.

Oh look....

2001 era graphics on a 2008 console....nice.

The Gamecube,er sorry, the Wii is doing a good job of keeping up.

This game has received alot of praise! A 5 seems a little harsh guys!

Let us pray for a Metroid Hunters online extravaganza for Wii. If Smash Bros/Mario Kart take off online, Nintendo will probably come up with something along those lines. Probably called Super Mario Doom or Kirby: Deathmatch Dandelions.

"First-person shooters are really not the Wii's forte really...
Metroid Prime 3 begs to differ..."

Forte:
a strong point, as of a person; that in which one excels.

I'm not sure one good title really qualifies.

"This game has received alot of praise! A 5 seems a little harsh guys!"

Surely those are unconnected statements.

We can't be suggesting that when EG score their reviews, they take scores given by other publications into account? I don't like the sound of that one bit. Much rather they call it as they see it, with enough supporting info that we can make up our own minds in the end.

LOL - another stellar FPS for the Wii

"A 5 seems a little harsh guys!"

Played it, have you? Thought not.

Is this the game that Gamespot were spaffing over in their 'End of Year Awards Spectacular' or whatever the hell it is they call it?

Wonder how much those kind words cost?

5 strikes me as a little harsh, too. But then I don't really have the perspective/context the reviewer has, in so far as I've played very few WWII FPS's over the years. That said, it all comes off kind of strange, boiling down to: we hate this game because it's just like a dozen other games... which we mostly liked and occasionally raved about. (Ironically, I was already bored w/ WWII shooters back then.)

As for the screenshots, well you knew the graphics were gonna suck. It's a Wii. Trying to crank out an FPS. The graphics are on par with an old XBox game, and those haven't left us permanently scarred or anything.

IMO, the game deserves better treatment on account of the control scheme alone (which the review acknowledges.) There's nothing out there with quite the versatility and intuitiveness of aiming the remote at the screen, and leaning around cover by tillting the nunchuck. (Silly that the Zapper is even "supported" since it throws this right out the window.) I might even prefer this to mouse and WASD. I really wish one of the graphically intensive next-gen consoles would make this sort of thing available by way of alternate controllers. That would be the best of both worlds.

Disclaimer: I only played this for a few hours on rental, and I don't doubt it's short. Then again I can't think of many games that wouldn't benefit by being shorter.

7/10 :)

Wiilol

darc - "As for the screenshots, well you knew the graphics were gonna suck. It's a Wii. Trying to crank out an FPS."

So what? That means we give developers free rein to simply not put any effort in whatsoever, and accept the low-poly visuals of a thrown-together PSP port as a system standard? This argument never held any water before, and it holds even less since the likes of Mario Galaxy and Smash Bros. Brawl have shown us what the hardware can truly aspire to. What's with this "trying to crank out an FPS" talk, like it's a hard thing to do? This isn't 1996; every post-Dreamcast console has the horsepower to do far more than "crank out" an FPS, and Metroid Prime 3, which easily looks five times as good as this, proves that the Wii certainly can.

Yes, the Wii's the least powerful system, and yes, it will reach the limits of its capabilities long before either of the competing systems; it's not reached them yet, however, and it sure as hell hasn't reached them with this pig-ugly handheld port.

Muddtallica: "This argument never held any water before, and it holds even less since the likes of Mario Galaxy and Smash Bros. Brawl have shown us what the hardware can truly aspire to."

While I appreciate the point you are making, not every game can resort to covering up the low res, low poly characters and environments by creative use of a simplistic cartoon look.

FPS on Wii: sux

someone get it sorted! surely it should be a match made in heaven!!

rotmm: http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?art...

Please go and look at any one of the fifty-odd screenshots of SMG in that gallery. "Simplistic cartoon look" or not, if you cannot see that the texture work, poly-count, shading, lighting, effects, model-work and environmental design is literally a hundred better in Mario Galaxy than it is in Medal of Honor, then you are either blind, or you are absolutely and bafflingly dead-set against giving people credit where it is due.

In any case, you're splitting hairs here. I already cited Metroid Prime 3, a game that does infinitely more with non-"simplistic cartoon" graphics than MoH does; hell, Resident Evil 4 looks far better than this, and that's a GCN game. Whichever way you slice it, graphics like this are simply not something anyone, developer or consumer, should be prepared to accept.

Wii games are just beautiful... I loved the 90's

Gamespot and IGN rated this game quite high.. IGN even said that the controls were better than Metroids.
I must admit that I'd rather play fps on Wii than any other console. In my opinion the controllers work way better for this kind of game, than a 360 or PS3 controller.

Mudtallica, I'm not sure why your reply is as agressive as it is (or maybe I'm just reading you wrong. I was being a little flip with the "you knew the graphics were gonna suck" bit, to boot.) Maybe you think I'm trashing on the Wii and I know that can put people off. That really wasn't my point at all. (I love the Wii, BTW.) At the heart of it, my point was simply that the graphics aren't all that important with this game. It's neither the game nor the platform that I would look to to impress me in 2008, with the likes of CoD4 for the 360 sitting right next to it. These very same graphics would have been fine with us two years ago, they're not that bad, and they're not that important, so let's move on. (After all there is a *game* to be played here.)

Developing further on that, I agree that the Wii is capable of better, and that we can expect much more from it in the years to come. (I'm still amazed at what I see out of recent Gamecube and PS2 titles.) On the other hand, I think a "realistic" WWII FPS makes very specific demands both technically and stylistically which prevent developers (and artists) from exploiting a console's strengths and sidestepping its weaknesses. Games like Mario Galaxy (a masterpiece) and even Metroid Prime present fantastical landscapes that can dazzle us with color schemes etc (while distracting from what is *not* present) because we don't carry preconceptions as with a real-world, historical setting.

So yeah, the Wii can probably do better, but I don't think the devs just took a dive on account of laziness either. (On the other hand, comparing the design work w/ a Mario title puts any competing developer at disadvantage. Nintendo knows they're going to sell Mario games, and won't hesitate to invest the person-hours in design.)

Hulle, I'm with you.

Sorry - guess I'm feeling a little verbose this afternoon. And no one here wants to talk about abstract vs. historically accurate game design. :) What's the opposite of "wiilols"?

Yaay online! Sold!

darc: Hmmm...well, I didn't mean to be as aggressive as I ended up being - just got a wee bit carried away, is all - but this is just a point that's been annoying me lately; playing Mario Galaxy has left me in little doubt that the Wii IS markedly more powerful than the GCN, PS2 and probably the Xbox, which has in turn vastly reduced my tolerance for developers releasing games such as this that look notably sub-last-gen. For me, it's become about more than the simple objective fact of what the game looks like; it's a point of principle about how much I feel the developer is actually trying to take advantage of the hardware.

Wii is doing...OK software-wise at the minute, but if it does ultimately fail, it will be because of the sizable contingent of lazy publishers willing to shovel out low-cost, low-effort ports and gimmick games to turn a quick buck. MoH, to be fair to it, does seem to have made genuine efforts to adapt to the Wii control scheme, and it deserves some credit for that, but when you're releasing identical-looking versions of the same game on Wii and PSP, either that means you've tried REALLY hard on PSP, or that you've not tried on Wii at all. After all, Xbox games routinely looked a lot better than their PS2 counterparts; why are developers often settling for sub-PS2 graphics on Wii? I'm not sure the realistic artstyle can be used as an excuse, either; as I said, Resi 4 remains to me a lovely-looking realistically-styled game, and given the additional horsepower of Wii, developers should be aiming to match that kind of standard at least; that they haven't, leaving a three-year-old Cube port as the best-looking game of its style on the system, suggests to me that something is going wrong.

I like my Wii just fine, and I didn't think you were trashing it at all; my point was that as Wii owners, we can and should expect more from the system than PSP-quality production values, and that doing so might be a good thing for the system...

PS - the opposite of "Wiilol" is "Loliiw".

When you make a console the cheapest do develop on you take the risk that developers are going to make crap for it, you just have to hope that enough gems get made to distract people from the crap that surrounds them.

Muddtallica: "Please go and look at any one of the fifty-odd screenshots of SMG in that gallery. "Simplistic cartoon look" or not, if you cannot see that the texture work, poly-count, shading, lighting, effects, model-work and environmental design is literally a hundred better in Mario Galaxy than it is in Medal of Honor, then you are either blind, or you are absolutely and bafflingly dead-set against giving people credit where it is due."

Thanks for the link to the pictures that prove my point, at the same time as proving that it is you suffering from a strange kind of blindness. The textures are flat and lack detail, the poly-count is very low (cleverly the developers managed to make a game where they don't even have to have a far draw distance), the shading is simple, the lighting doesn't even cast dynamic shadows, the model work is nice and low-poly and the environmental design is simplistic.

Don't get me wrong, the developers have done a fantastic job of creating a look that fits perfectly with the cartoonish Mario world, but it is very much a case of art direction and the clever use of colours creating the illusion of the game being more technically impressive than it is.

But you talk about not giving credit where it's due, yet seem hell bent on attacking the developers of MoH on the Wii, who have attempted (and largely succeeded) creating a "realistic look" on a console that, despite your protestations, has nothing like the rendering power of the original Xbox. Yet they have still managed to create a gameworld chock full of environmental details and with an impressive draw distance, that can have many decent looking characters on screen with soft shadows, has nice looking weapon models, solid animations and particle effects such fire and smoke the really do the job. And it does all of that while running smoothly at pretty much all times and supports up to 32 players online.

To me, it's clear which game is more impressive from a technical viewpoint. And it's not the one your selective blindness forces you to think it is.

Ive just heard from various people who have bought the game locally Australia, the online play has been removed from the AU version. This is a complete an utter joke for those who were looking forward to some online FPS action! So to those who visit eurogamer from down under, please be aware of this or purchase the UK version.