Medal of Honor: Airborne Xbox 360 Review
Sep 9, 2007
Finally the Medal of Honor series shows some signs of life! After years of churning out rote scripted corridor shooters with all the vitality and kick of some old geezer at the VFW, Medal of Honor takes off with Airborne, and then drops into the overdone battlefields of WWII from an entirely new angle. Medal of Honor: European Assault showed promise trying to shoehorn open level design onto last-gen systems, but now Airborne lives up to that promise on the 360 and PCs.
Instead of going from point A to point B, you start a level by parachuting down into the spaces between your objectives. Tackle them in whichever order you like. When you die, you're usually respawned in mid-air, giving you a chance to start from someplace new. The parachuting is at its most inspired when you find a nice little spot, such as a shortcut to some objective high up in the sniper-infested catwalks of a German industrial facility, or onto the roof of a building that lets you thin out some enemies hunkered down in trenches. Be sure not to miss the church steeple in Nijmegen. After running and gunning through the ruined streets, it's a wonderful bird's eye view of the fighting, particularly if you've had the foresight to bring along the Springfield sniper rifle.
The gunfights are dramatic and satisfying. By helping your own men advance, or sometimes falling back if too many of them are killed, Airborne presents the ebb and flow of capturing territory a little bit at a time. The iron sights and the use of cover are really well done, letting you easily lean around, cower behind, and shoot over obstacles. It's no Rainbow Six: Vegas, but it might be the next best thing.
The AI does a great job of making the firefights challenging. Enemy soldiers use cover and grenades, and they're more than willing to respond to flanking or incoming grenades by moving to a new spot. This is a game of maneuvering as much as it's a game of shooting.
On anything but the easiest difficulty level, Airborne can be punishing, particularly if you don't take the time to let allied soldiers keep pace with you. Raising the difficulty level seems to make ammunition scarce, and then compounds the problem by giving bad guys extra hit points. The game is saved at every objective, but when you die, you can lose a lot of progress, which includes the upgrade to your weapons. It's awfully disheartening to patiently level up your sniper rifle (there's a weird "squeeze" dynamic to steady your view, which ironically makes it harder to adjust your aim), only to loose it all to yet another of the enemy's brutally efficient grenade tosses. However, one of the best things about the weapon upgrade system is that it makes it easier to replay the missions on harder difficulty levels once you've finished the campaign. Airborne is nothing if not replayable.
The game is at its worst when it resorts to cheap scripting tricks and chokepoints. For instance, in a level set amid ancient ruins, you have to destroy some communications equipment. You're within spitting distance of the equipment, but you can't get past an invulnerable wooden gate, and you can't open it, even though you can see the pulsing red lock on the other side. Try as you might, your bullets won't hurt it from this side. So you have to work your way past the field of fire of a few machine gun emplacements, through some tunnels, and then over some scaffolding seeded with defenders. Only then can you reach the communications equipment, shooting the lock to let yourself back out into the level.
There are a few of these contrived speed bumps in each level, forcing you along tediously difficult bits that you'll have to replay over and over again. No, Virginia, this isn't entirely a wide-open unscripted shooter after all.
The maps hit all the points you'd expect, from destroyed towns to fields to trenches to bunkers. It's all the standard WWII stuff, complete with the usual tropes: assembling bazooka bits before you can blow up the marauding tank, planting charges on AA guns, scrounging desperately for health kits, and so on.
To its credit, Airborne is willing to get a little outrageous. From minigunners with a bazillion hit points (wearing gas masks for no good reason) to rocket launcher shoot outs to assault rifles kitted with Rainbow Six style sights, the game is not above the occasional touch of silliness in the name of fun. The final level has you jogging up and down some crazy Nazi tower that looks like something Sauron would build. We'll take this Wolfenstein comic bookiness over bland reverence any day.
The parachuting adds a nice element to the multiplayer, essentially giving players on one team the ability to spawn in at any location they want. It doesn't feel unbalanced so much as it opens up the vertical side of the maps. Those rooftops aren't as safe as they are in other shooters. It's a bit disappointing that there aren't more gameplay modes, particularly since the only objective mode can be awfully difficult. One team has to control all three victory locations at once. These matches tend to veer between the extremes of grossly unbalanced or tedious stalemates.
The setting might be played out, but if you're up for another WWII shooter, Airborne won't disappoint. Yeah, sure, you've been here before, but you've never seen the view from up here. Fortuantely, the game holds up once your boots are on the ground as well.