Medal of Honor

Original release date: November 11th, 1999

Release date on PSN: June 2nd, 2009

Price : 5.99

Story

Medal of Honor is a truly legendary game, and the story that goes along with it is legendary as well. This one started the craze of WW2 shooters and I can tell why, it’s engaging and there are always a place to go and nazis to shoot along the way. The real propaganda videos spliced between missions are great to watch as well, you get a little bit of history with your gaming expercience and it’s a refreshing change to most shooters.

You play as nameless agent X, an American service agent who’s particularly good at killing Germans, so you get these special missions helping out the French resistance, taking out German artillery, etc. etc. It’s light on the story but the gameplay makes up for it.

Gameplay

This is ace shooter glory, the controls are great, and within a few levels I could headshot every enemy that made it across my path, even on the psp (the psp’s controls are much superior in this regard seeing as you can change them to your liking, on the PS3 the controls are clunky at best and unplayable at worst, coming from my roomate who plays shooters almost exclusively).

There are a mulitude of weapons to choose from, grenades, rifles, machine guns, pistols, all seemingly authentic, they sound great and seeing the hand snap back after every shot makes it all the better. Probably the only well playing (gameplay wise) first person shooter I’ve played on the PSP (best third person shooters are the PSP Syphon Filter games). The gameplay in this game is truly great.

Graphics

Once again, on the PSP this game is a looker, there are a few things that look horrible, like the attack dogs, but the animations on enemies if you shoot them are really authentic (looks like they even used motion capture on them) they limp if you shoot their legs, slump if you shoot them in the head, first rate animations all around. The level design is great too, it takes a little bit of exploration to find your way, but not too much, and you always get rewarded for straying off the beaten path.

Music and voice acting once again are top notch, the music was composed by Micheal Giancchino, who’s work you’ve now heard in major movies, like the lastest Star Trek, Mission Impossible 3, and TV shows like Lost. The music is one of the best game soundtracks I’ve ever heard, great orchestral crashes keep the action exciting, sometimes sound effects blended into the music think there’s a baddie walking around the corner when there isn’t, but that’s forgivable with such stirring music.

How it holds up today

Medal of Honor has great graphics, gameplay, music and story, how could this game receive anything but praise? I’ll tell you how — Glitches!  Truly unforgivable ones. I’m guessing this has something to do with the code PSN received from Dreamworks studios, but the most interesting thing happens when you succeed in a level. The music starts to glitch, stripping that pleasure away from your ears, then somewhere coming up in the level if you’re lucky, the game will hang, or there will be an invisible wall stopping your progress. That is what happens after you complete a level. If you die during the mission, the same glitch will follow you. I downloaded the game more than once from PSN, but the same problem followed me. I couldn’t even bring myself to complete the game, because to fix this glitch you have to restart the game, load up your save, then load your way back into the level. I’m really dissappointed by this, as it’s such a legendary and famous franchise, it’s sad that this problem creeps up. I probably would have put it up at the 9.0+ scale had this glitch not shown up.

3.5/10

A great, quality game, marred by a horrible glitch that kidnaps all the fun.