Medal of Honor: Underground

Dreamworks Interactive

h/t GameFAQs for screenshots

Medal of Honor has an Americentrism problem. For all the fact that Call of Duty has long devolved into militarist propaganda, it’s fair to say that at least for most of its existence it has strived to tell multinational stories of global conflict. Not Medal of Honor, though. Nearly every single one of its games features an American soldier, sometimes in places where he doesn’t belong historically. You can sort of get around this with the plot thread of serving as agents in the OSS (the wartime precursor to the CIA) but sometimes the series doesn’t even do that: Medal of Honor: Airborne famously rewrote history so that the Americans won Operation Market Garden, in actuality one of the Allies’ biggest screw-ups, prolonging the war by another eight to nine months.

Ah, but I did say “nearly,” right? Welcome to Medal of Honor: Underground, the series’ sole exception to its fixation on American heroes.

When Medal of Honor hit the Sony PlayStation in 1999, hot on the heels of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, it was an overnight sensation: the first real mainstream World War II shooter for the modern era, and, importantly, one of the most ambitious first person shooters on a platform that by and large didn’t have a lot of great ones. When you have a runaway success like that you pretty much have to make a sequel, and it didn’t take Dreamworks Interactive long to crank out the follow-up. While there’s a lot we can say about Medal of Honor as a franchise in the post-PSX era, Underground is quite humble. Other than a few mechanical changes, it’s stylistically no different from its predecessor — same engine, same look, same feel. You could almost call it a glorified expansion pack, but that’s a little unfair in my opinion.

Underground does one big thing different from the rest of the series: the protagonist is not just not American, but a woman, a rather daring French resistance fighter by the name of Manon Batiste who gets picked up by the OSS in 1942 and spends the next few years looking for revenge for the death of her brother. Based on a couple of real people, Manon is in this game an unvoiced cipher, quite different from her role as the main character’s handler in the original game, but that seems to be par for the course with shooters of this era. She doesn’t even get the whole game to herself — finish the seventh mission and you unlock an eighth, apparently non-canon mission where you reprise your role as Jimmy Patterson, the hero of the first game, investigating a haunted castle in Germany. (That’s right, Medal of Honor had Nazi zombies as a post-game bonus before Call of Duty did.)

Underground is superficially a lot of fun. With excellent sound design including a fantastic soundtrack, stock footage of the war straight from the History Channel, real period weapons (including a few weird ones!) and even interviews of female veterans of the anti-Nazi resistance, it’s got a sense of authenticity to it that shines through despite the primitive presentation. It’s this authenticity that I think has been a defining feature of Medal of Honor, and indeed the early Call of Duty games; it’s got a vibe that helps it feel just a little bit more real. But not realistic; Underground, like most of the franchise, feels a bit like a half-baked Half-Life — it’s linear to a fault, being rather unashamedly a corridor shooter, which thus requires little thinking on the player’s part in terms of achieving objectives, while lacking the setpiece encounters that makes Half-Life and its most successful imitators transcend their linear design. The way weapons work is decidedly retro as well; you’ll start each mission with predetermined equipment, and enemies will drop ammo for your guns even if logically they should not be compatible, i.e. picking up ammo for your 9mm Sten gun from dropped MP44s — it’s all SMG ammo to you, or rifle or pistol ammo. Sometimes you’ll get to pick up a new weapon, usually something special like a panzerschrek, but for the most part you’re limited to two weapons (which don’t even always stay the same from one level to the next within a mission) of differing applications. Even the enemy placement feels like a throwback — they’ll sometimes just teleport in from places you just cleared, or they might just pop into reality right in front of your eyes.

While Underground, like the original game, lifts a lot from the Nintendo 64 classic Goldeneye 007, it’s got rather less emphasis on stealth, despite the presence of things like silenced pistols, and disguises. A couple of levels have you posing as a foreign correspondent to get into restricted areas: flatter the guards by letting them pose for a photo and they’ll let you in. But even this is kind of janky and weird and inconsistent; you can forego stealth entirely if you want, and sometimes you’ll just have to. And by the end, stealth just stops mattering.

Probably the biggest problem I have with Underground is generally the same problem I have with almost every other console shooter up to around 2007 or so: it controls like absolute dogshit. It’s difficult to really draw a bead on your enemies; if you have a Dualshock — and you should — it’s a little easier, but your turning and aiming speed generally tend to be quite floaty. There is an aim button, but all it does is zoom in slightly and make you unable to move, but you can move your crosshairs all over the screen. With a mouse, this could almost be an interesting mechanic, but trying to play it on a game pad is a little frustrating.

Nevertheless, I acknowledge a lot of my complaints about the game boil down to “old game is old.” Medal of Honor: Underground is absolutely a product of its time, and in spite of sometimes almost punishing difficulty especially later on, there’s a lot to like it for. Released in 2000, it was unfortunately a victim of coming out at a time when the industry was in transition, and hot new systems — including the PlayStation 2 — were muscling out the old ones. I think that’s why it didn’t get as much attention as its predecessor.

That might also be why it got a port, of sorts, to the Game Boy Advance. At least, that’s the most logical assumption one can make; my real theory is that Rebellion needed cash. Rebellion has long been an extremely hit or miss company; their Aliens vs. Predator games are almost without reproach, and Sniper Elite is at long last a flagship series they can just print money with. But they’ve made a lot of licensed games and ports of varying quality, and Medal of Honor: Underground is just… uniquely awful. First person shooter games on the GBA isn’t unusual — Doom and Doom II both got ports, Duke Nukem Advance is a brand new adventure for the king, and Dark Arena — while not great — was an original title with levels designed by Doom community members. But Underground has just about no redeeming features. So maybe for all my gripes about the PSX version I should be more lenient — I could be playing the GBA version!

Ultimately, I like Medal of Honor: Underground, at least on PlayStation. I can’t say it’ll ever be my favorite game, but it’s good enough that if someone were to, say, remake it in the Goldsrc engine, I’d definitely get excited for that.

-june❤