Medal of Honor: Airborne [X360]

Medal of Honor Airborne is an exciting new approach to a genre that's all but exhausted its options. Short of retreating to some obscure corner or the Balkans or China, there aren't many places left to visit in World War II. So Airborne opts for a new direction: from above.

"The airdrops were some of the biggest operations in history," says Patrick Gilmore, the executive producer of Electronic Arts' Medal of Honor Airborne, the latest in their long running series of WWII shooter. "There were some drops where they had 30,000 paratroopers and 20,000 planes in the air."

The game will recreate five major operations. It opens with Operation Husky, the disastrous first attempt at an airborne invasion. Most of the first wave of paratroopers was wildly blown off course by strong winds. When reinforcements dropped in the next day, a quarter of their planes were shot down by friendly fire. The second operation is the follow-up to Husky in which the airborne forces redeemed themselves by helping to capture the port of Salerno, which gave the Allies a foothold on Sicily, and therefore Italy.

Then the action shifts to the Normandy invasion, natch. But this time, you'll be moving backwards from the traditional way you've played Normandy invasions: you start inland and work your way to the beaches. The operation will end with a climactic view from the cliffs of the Allies coming ashore. Next is airborne's doomed role in Operation Market Garden, where paratroopers dropped in to secure bridges in Holland, only to have to wait on the overly cautious General Montgomery. Finally, Medal of Honor Airborne winds up with a massive paradrop into Germany at the end of the war. "And we've got an unbelievable surprise waiting for you in the last level that will blow your mind," Gilmore says.

But these aren't just more battles for the traditional WWII running-and-gunning. Instead, you enter a level by floating down from above, steering your chute as you descend. What this means is that you decide where in the level you want to start.

"There's barely a first-person shooter that wouldn't break if it did that," Gilmore says, and he's right. Shooters are traditionally scripted for the player to start at point A and end at point B, spawning enemies accordingly. But Airborne is built so that the entire level is pre-populated and it's up to you to decide where you enter. Gilmore says this has "a huge emotional impact". He talks about landing and immediately running to put his back against a wall. This isn't something you'd do in any other shooter, where you trust the developers aren't going to start you off someplace dangerous. But every mission in Airborne begins with a sense of unpredictability.

The last few Medal of Honor titles have attempted more dynamic AI. Now EA has a fancy new name for the same behavior: "affordance engine", named after the concept that objects have a number of latent possibilities based on the environment. The terminology is new, but the concept isn't uncommon, either to Medal of Honor or its competition. Recent fare like Brothers in Arms or Company of Heroes features AI that knows when to take cover, where to take cover, when to retreat, and so on.