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images c/o MobyGames (360 version) |
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Medal of Honor has an Americentrism problem. From the overuse of the OSS as a plot device to excuse Americans being in places they had no business being, to the series essentially outright implying that America won World War II all by its lonesome, there’s an irony in Call of Duty’s early games being lambasted for jingoism when Medal of Honor is far more guilty. Take Medal of Honor: Airborne, for instance.
If you’ve played Medal of Honor: Vanguard, Airborne will seem somewhat familiar. Consisting of six missions, you’ll be parachuting into combat zones across Europe, and tasked with taking out objectives. The twist is that the levels are actually fairly open, allowing you to land pretty much wherever the hell you want and tackle your objectives in any order. While this is a fairly cool idea, it presents some problems.
Unlike Vanguard, story is functionally nil. There are zero characters to care about, none. Almost none of the NPCs have names. Despite trying desperately to be a new spin on the Call of Duty formula, the game basically lets you do your thing, so you can absolutely wander away from the fighting if you want to. More often than not, you’ll be assaulting objectives alone, made more absurd when you hear the disembodied voices of soldiers who are not there urging you on. For a genre as notorious for being light on story as that which Medal of Honor embodies, Airborne is shockingly devoid of even a cursory narrative — the only thing stringing it all together is the main character, Travis Boyd, and his journey from Sicily to Germany. Each mission opens with you and your buddies in a plane, usually not everyone gets off the plane alive, you jump out, pull your chute, and try to find a safe place to land. Cue about 20 to 30 minutes of shooting Nazis and doing objectives, and then it’s back up in the air for the next one.
Combat is basically the standard Call of Duty
cover shooter mold but with a few new twists. Regenerating health has
been substituted for segmented health, an idea lifted from Resistance: Fall of Man;
the basic idea is that your health is divided into segments, which
individually regenerate, but you’ll need to find first aid packs to heal
segments you’ve lost. Weapons laying around can all be picked up and
used, and the more you use them, the more perks you unlock, for example
the Thompson getting a 50-round drum for when you absolutely must kill
every last Nazi in the room. Thanks to the wonky hitboxes and wonkier
enemy health you’ll probably wind up using all 50 rounds to kill like
three guys.
Ah, but I mentioned Americentrism, didn’t I? I haven’t forgotten. The way the narrative would have you believe it, the war starts and ends with the 82nd Airborne; the franchise had never been so openly nationalist. (And it didn’t get any better with the modern-day reboot a few years later.) It’s full of little emotionally manipulative tricks, like stuffing you into a plane full of soldiers and making you watch them die all while the game waxes philosophical about bravery and duty. It’s shockingly masturbatory even by Medal of Honor standards. And that’s not even getting into the completely made-up final scenario that has you assaulting a flak tower complete with SS troopers toting portable MG42s like something out of Wolfenstein.
Medal of Honor: Airborne is an odd duck. It was clearly Electronic Arts’ last-ditch attempt at keeping the franchise relevant; the release of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare buried the World War II theme seemingly for good. EA saw the complaints about the on-rails feeling of Call of Duty
and tried to make something more open-ended, but in the end the concept
proved too ambitious for the execution. With its politics firmly rooted
in Bush-era jingoism on top of everything else, it just dates itself
immediately.
This is how the World War II shooter genre ends: not with a bang, but a whimper. (At least until Call of Duty: World At War.)
-june❤
Part of a series on Medal of Honor
| Medal of Honor | Medal of Honor: Underground |
| Medal of Honor: Allied Assault | |
| MOHAA: Spearhead | MOHAA: Breakthrough |
| Medal of Honor: Frontline | Medal of Honor: Rising Sun |
| Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault | Medal of Honor: European Assault |
| Medal of Honor: Heroes | Medal of Honor: Heroes 2 |
| Medal of Honor: Vanguard | Medal of Honor: Airborne |
| Medal of Honor (2010) | Medal of Honor: Warfighter |
| Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond | |
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