About the modern war in Afghanistan, you can make a funny commercial game: for this only healthy cynicism and more scenes in the spirit of the American ax reveals the throat Ali Babe and Magpie Mujahideen ”. And it is possible to be serious: after consultations with specialists, reflection on the topic of asymmetric war in the most difficult geographical conditions, where enemies are outwardly indistinguishable from peaceful shepherds, and those, in turn, from the fighters of elite American special forces (representatives of all three groups wear dark glasses, beards and armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles). Problems begin when the developer tries to combine both of these concepts in ten levels of a single -user campaign ..
Ranks of madness
If you buy games of the series Medal of Honor (and generally military shooters) because of the multiplayer, then all the above and the above does not concern you. Feel free to take the new one Moh – The multiplayer regime made EA Dice , It uses the Frostbite engine, there are eight professionally made cards with a destroyed environment (having nothing to do with the single), and the classes of the characters and customization of the weapon are no different from Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Plus Afghan flavor, kabul, kandahar, home -made explosive devices and militants in dusty robes.
We’ll now talk about the single – the very one with which the authors were going to resurrect the Medal of Honor franchise stalled in 2007, to modernize the series and again make it the main competitor Call of Duty. About the single, in which there is neither Kabul nor Kandahar, but there are many dark caves and snowy mountains.
The single mode of MOH created an elite Los Angeles unit Electronic Arts (with a beautiful military name Danger Close ). In an interview, the developers expressed a desire to fully use the features of an unusual setting (after all, before Arma 2: Operation Arrowhead We did not have a single shooter, the action of which would be completely unfolded in Afghanistan) and show the real methods of the work of the "sea cats" and the Delta units.
The scenery in the game is really unusual. Arcade military attractions like Call of Duty and Medal of Honor are built on a frequent change in spectacular asses – either the beach, then the desert, then the snow, and so on, up to the near -Earth orbit … Single -user levels of the new MOH would be more like a serious military simulator: mountainY native, desert, desert, desert, desert, desert. mountains. At every opportunity, the developers make Hollywood Knicksen (warehouses with ammunition explode, transport helicopters fall, not a single mission does not do without artillery, aviation or air shelling), but the natural and climatic conditions of Afghanistan are extremely disadvantageous scenery for the blockbuster.
Remember the ending of Bad Company 2: there everything was crowned by a shootout after a parachute jump from an exploding aircraft. In Medal of Honor, the last three missions unfold in the same snow -covered mountains – they are devoted to the misadventures of the rangers and “sea cats”, which were cut off from their own and in vain are waiting for helicopters from Kandahar. In the Operation Arrowhead, such a climax would look normal, but it was still a military simulator that is traditionally customary with fastened buttons and an extremely serious face. Medal of Honor seems to belong to a different category of games, so this end looks like a museum of aluminum chairs in the middle. That is, at least ridiculous, or even just a shame. At the same time, instead of Frostbite, the single -year ago is used by the Unreal Engine 3 engine, which frankly cannot cope with the processing of Afghan expanses (therefore, a large -scale battle "Rangers against the Taliban" takes place under the cover of a dusty storm). As a result, visually the game is very losing that Bad Company 2 or last year's Modern Warfare 2, but also Arma 2, which even the most stubborn lover of military simulators will not call a beautiful.
Simple task
At heart, MOH is not a full -scale military simulator, but an arcade with a harsh minimum of scenery, participants and special effects. All that was required of the developers is to correctly arrange the scripts and points of the repaan of the Taliban so that the player can hastily slip through the level and enjoy beautiful explosions. And for some reason they could not cope with this simple task in Danger Close.
At some levels in search of the right script point, you have to run around all the nooks and bounds (and this is a certain death for playing an outdated engine with primitive textures), something refuses the structure of the missions on others-and your Apache is sent over and over again to hunt for invisible mortar calculation. Some of this can be corrected in patches … But, friends, we are not talking about a budget European shooter, but about the flagship project Electronic Arts! Remember, when the last time you saw the mainstream game, in which to pass the perishable mission, it would be necessary to restart the level from the first checkpoint?
New MoH is not too beautiful and suffering from numerous bugs game in a dull setting. It remains to hope for some stunning, all justifying finds in gameplay … But they are not here either here either!
All the best gaming moments are borrowed – you can easily find out the level of Cliffhanger (only snowmobiles in MOH have changed to motorized vehicles) and the Afghan aviation cemetery, shamelessly stolen from Modern Warfare 2. And if the characters of Bad Company 2 could afford to mock MW2 from the height of a beautiful original single-chapel, then MOH is the game of the wrong flight and scope so that she could forgive such “friendly” allations for creativity for creativity Infinity Ward.
Finally, the game turned out to be too easy. It is difficult to demand from the attraction of sophisticated tactical maneuvers, but at the Normal level in MOH Monopoly Casino you can be killed in only one case: if you are in full growth in an open place. If you move at least a little (there are no systems for the use of shelters in the game, but you can quite deftly roll up to the enemies on the ass), the taliba frozen on the firing positions are lost and are unable to show even formal resistance.
In addition to the usual single in MOH, there is a special mode Tier 1, in which the game goes for a while, there are no checkpoints and you can not beg to beg for the ammunition from partners. Here the idiotic behavior of enemies becomes clear – otherwise it would be simply impossible to play in Tier 1 … But if it was worth the sake of one special mode to sacrifice the entire single -user campaign?
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The new Medal of Honor is not such a high -quality game that it was interesting to play for the first time, and not so deep that it is interesting to replay in Tier 1 mode. The unusual setting and the appearance of the bearded special forces is leveled by the desire of the developers to arrange a harmless attraction, which is not more than in the landing in Normandy from Medal of Honor 2.
The only thing that remains in the asset with MOH is multiplayer (which was done by a completely different company on another engine). But he in Medal of Honor is by no means original, in fact – Modern Warfare 2 of the third stage of distillation. So it turns out that the valuable in this game is about one modest multiplayer addon to Bad Company 2. This is also a good result, but in comparison with Call of Duty Medal of Honor, it looks like the warm-up performance of the Origami EMS before the Linkin Park concert: young men with funny hairstyles, of course, are very glorious, but the scale is incompetent. This is not enough for the revival of the series of three years ago.
Grade : 6