Medal of Honor was once THE war first person shooter, until the EA failed to keep the franchise relevant once Call of Duty 4 came about. The series began on the PlayStation with Steven Spielberg (creator of Boom Blox on the Wii), Dreamworks and EA. By the time of Frontline, Dreamworks Interactive was sold off to EA and was rebranded as EA Los Angeles, and the franchise became a multi-platform game on the next generation of systems.
The game opens with D-Day and…it’s actually rather tame. It’s small, there aren’t many people and there isn’t a huge sense of danger. You have to rescue your squad, who are just crouched alongside small objects and mostly out in the open. While it worked extremely well as the opening to Saving Private Ryan, a video game version of D-Day really should be later on in the game where it can be more unforgiving.
It also doesn’t capture the horror of the situation. Despite being a comedy game, I’d even say that the D-Day parody in Conker’s Bad Fur Day captured the nature of it far better.
The rest of the levels are fairly typical for an FPS at the time, with a lot of the time taken up by just roaming the levels to find the right path. One thing that doesn’t help is the amount of doors, with no obvious indicator as to which ones are the ones you can actually use, and a bunch of dead end areas that can waste your time. I was also slightly baffled as to how the second batch of levels revolved around you sneaking onto a U-boat, destroying it when you got to the German factory, then sabotaging the factory and U-boats single-handedly. Then in the third, you’re escorting someone else as they blow up tanks.
There are still some enjoyable moments, but this feels like an awkward middle ground to more open first person shooters and more modern set-piece shooters. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the game, I just don’t think it holds up as it doesn’t do anything unique.