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Posted September 27, 2012 by Zeth in Previews
 
 

Medal of Honour Warfighter Preview

mohw2
mohw2

In Medal of Honour Warfighter EA are hoping to build from the average work-a-day first title in the franchise reboot.  Released last year the game was a huge disappointment in both sales and its ability to rekindle the Medal of Honour franchise.

 

Licking its wounds for the past year there are high hopes that EA, and Danger Close can take their real world based shooter and move it back to the prime time once again.  Certainly the game is sticking to the parts that made it stand out last time.  The real world settings, the reduced bombast of a title like Call of Duty, the use of real world scenarios for level design and missions.

Unofficially billed as the “off year” partner of Battlefield EA must be keen for this to succeed to give them that annual shooter franchise they so desperately desire.  Whereas Activision are milking Call of Duty every year, at least EA  are allowing a 2 year dev cycle for their titles – well on the most part.

We got a chance to play the latest build recently, and were reasonably optimistic that EA had at least addressed some of the issues of the first title.

Diving in to Medal of Honour Warfighter it’s pretty obvious it uses Dice’s Frostbyte engine.   The deep blacks and serious tones of Battlefield 3 are evident throughout the graphics of the game.  It looks good when running and things move at a smooth enough clip but the engine is not coping well.  Jagged edges, misaligned geometry, clipping and a whole host of small issues are all on display – we shall hope these are ironed out before the games release date.

Diving back in to the shooting then it all feels very similar to the previous title.  Danger Close has stuck very closely to their original game play structure.  Fire fights are small intense affairs.  A few insurants can easy over run your elite squad of fighters in these tight fighting conditions.

The game seems to punish the smallest mistake or foolish rush of adrenaline very severely with just a few shots rendering you dead and gone.  This is compounded by the fact that once the bullets start to fly you struggle to see or control your aiming well enough to do anything about it.  Add to that the fact that sometimes the enemy just appears behind you or out of nowhere and you have a mixture for some intense and incredibly frustrating combat situations.

What I played – which was maybe 15 – 20 minutes – did nothing to lighten my heart or distil the fears I have for this game and once great franchise.  And I say that as a diehard Medal of Honour fan from day one.

With Battlefield 3 pulling big numbers last year EA got a taste of the Call of Duty money and they want more understandably.  Whether the reboot of this franchise makes them the money they hope – or by all accounts need –is yet to be seen.  It appears that this holiday season things are a little crowded in the shooter market.  If all else fails at least EA have Crytek pumping out Crysis titles

Medal of Honour Warfighter releases 23/10/12 (US), 25/10/12 (EU) and 26/10/12 (UK) on PC, Xbox 360, PS3 & Wii U.


Zeth

 
Zeth is our EU ninja and Editor in Chief. He's been writing about video games since 2008 when he started on BrutalGamer. He's pretty old and has been a gamer since he played Space Invaders as a young boy in the 80's. His genre tastes lean towards platformers, point-and-click adventure, action-adventure and shooters but he'll turn his hand to anything.