Medal of Honor: Airborne [X360]

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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.