Medal of Honor: Allied Assault + expansions

Medal of Honor: Allied Assault
MOHAA: Spearhead
MOHAA: Breakthrough

2015, Inc.
EA Los Angeles (Spearhead)
TKO Software (Breakthrough)

images c/o MobyGames. Base game is depicted.

It’s funny, the way some games and franchises coast on nostalgia. It’s my opinion that the Medal of Honor series just isn’t very good, overall; the games are of varying quality, often falling short of their ambitions, but one thing you can’t fault them for is their dedication to authenticity, or at least the feeling of authenticity. It’s this feeling that I think is the driving factor behind the series’ continued position on a pedestal that I don’t think it totally deserves, and no game in the series is more emblematic of this than Medal of Honor: Allied Assault.

This is not to say that Allied Assault is a bad game; at the very least, I would say it’s a good game with some deeply questionable parts. It’s probably more accurate to say that it’s a product of its time: developer 2015, Inc. was founded in 1997 as a coterie of former amateur Quake modders, and it shows. After releasing their first game, an expansion pack for the cult cyberpunk action shooter SiN, they were tapped by Steven Spielberg (on recommendation by none other than id Software) to develop a new Medal of Honor game following the sale of Dreamworks Interactive to Electronic Arts at the turn of the millennium. Allied Assault, released in 2002, is in some ways very much a Medal of Honor game, yet at the same time a strange outlier in the franchise. It was the first PC game (and exclusive at that) in a predominantly console-only franchise. Alongside Battlefield 1942 (also published by Electronic Arts that same year) it firmly established the World War II theme as a multiplayer favorite. And it laid the foundation for Call of Duty — and no surprise, given that many key 2015 Inc. staff would move on to found Infinity Ward. You might even recognize some names: Vince Zampella and Jason West, both of whom have of course since moved on to greener pastures.

If you’ve played the original Medal of Honor (or its immediate sequel) you already know how Allied Assault works. Functionally they’re very similar games: stealth is window dressing at best; ammunition is semi-universal (rifle ammo works in every rifle, sub machine gun ammo works in every sub machine gun, and so on); it still has a lot of the same odd linearity of the earlier games, but since early 2000s PCs are just inherently more powerful than the PlayStation (or PlayStation 2 for that matter) the levels aesthetically feel bigger… but you’re still going to be walking in a relatively straight line from one objective to the next. Compare this to Call of Duty: famously linear, yes, no argument there, but the actual map design feels more like an actual place. Allied Assault still just feels weirdly tunnelly in the same way the original games did. It even reuses a couple of plot points, such as a loose recreation of the original game’s first level where you must track down a crashed plane and retrieve intel, or a return to the infamous Fort Schmerzen (again from the original game) to destroy it once and for all. Colonel Hargrove and Manon both have cameo appearances, and even the menu is lifted straight from the original.

There’s a few spots where it changes things up a bit, though, and you can see the early DNA of Call of Duty. After two straightforward Medal of Honor 1-style missions, you’re shipped off to land at Omaha Beach, and boy let me tell you, 2015 make you pay for every inch of the map in blood and presses of the quickload key. It’s a trend in these kinds of games where the enemy AI soldiers will decide to focus all their fire not on the couple dozen fellow soldiers on your side, but on you in particular, because they just hate you that much. Allied Assault is no different, especially in the Omaha Beach segment; it makes for a very frustrating experience. This is on top of the usual Medal of Honor trope of your enemies being able to tank a sniper rifle bullet to the face, sometimes even two, making them quite difficult to put down, and your weapons are pretty inaccurate, so you’re blowing through a lot of ammunition just to progress. But even all that doesn’t hold a candle to Sniper Alley.

MOHAA: Spearhead

Late in the game, there’s a sequence — inspired by Saving Private Ryan — where you must find and escort an American tank crew across a ruined French town which is absolutely infested with German snipers, who have 100% accuracy, blend into the environment, and do tremendous damage with every shot, even on lower difficulties. The intention is that you’re supposed to go slow, take your time, and observe your surroundings, but Sniper Elite this is not, and ultimately it’s just an exercise in frustration.

There’s a lot of moments in the game like that, where interesting ideas just don’t really hold up execution-wise. A moment towards the very end of the game has you supporting a group of U.S. Army Rangers as they’re ambushed by snipers on a train platform; it becomes a game of pop-up as there seems to be an endless collection of snipers in reserve, as soon as you shoot one he’s replaced by another. If too many Rangers die, it’s game over. It comes down to practice, with learning the patterns of the snipers’ behavior, and a little bit of luck, as while the snipers here aren’t as lethally accurate, they still do a lot of damage and the patterns in which they appear or duck out of sight are erratic.

But there’s a lot to like about Allied Assault. A lot of it is that same secret sauce that makes the original Medal of Honor so memorable; it’s got atmosphere in spades, especially in the final mission, which drops you into the Hürtgen forest mid-winter with no music but a bone-chilling atmospheric track with howling winds and distant barking dogs. But I think the big thing that ultimately wins me over is just the fact that it’s on mouse and keyboard makes it a lot more playable. I’m not opposed to console shooters, but magine trying to do the sniper town levels on a controller! I think I’d have thrown my console through my plate glass patio doors, gotten a face tattoo and moved to rural Argentina. The idTech 3 engine, which powered Quake III Arena, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and Heavy Metal F.A.K.K. 2 (which provided the basis for Allied Assault’s engine) was the right choice: it’s robust, it’s powerful, and it’s open source, which is why probably the best way to play Allied Assault today is OpenMoHAA, the sole source port for Allied Assault and its expansions. While it’s still in development, the campaigns at least are feature-complete, and it comes with built-in multiplayer features like bots and a ban system. (We’ll discuss multiplayer in an upcoming feature, so keep an eye out!)

Like most popular PC shooters of the era, Allied Assault got two expansions. The first, oddly enough, is by Dreamworks Interactive themselves, recently renamed to EA Los Angeles. Titled Spearhead, it’s shockingly much closer to feeling like Call of Duty than the base game. While it still has its moments where you’re alone behind enemy lines, it’s generally a lot more action-oriented. It also has an excellent example of the franchise’s Americentrism problem, with the final mission having your character, an American, participate alongside the Soviets in the Battle of Berlin. There’s also some important fixes and quality of life features, such as being able to lean in singleplayer (bizarrely, it’s only available in multiplayer in the base game.) But hey, at least Gary Oldman’s in this!

MOHAA: Breakthrough

A second expansion came out not long after that. Breakthrough was developed by the shortlived TKO Software, a small outfit out of Santa Cruz with a brief, but eclectic resume that includes the multiplayer for Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault, and what I’m guessing was the multiplayer for a weird James Bond spinoff. Taking a different tack by focusing almost entirely on Tunisia and later the invasion of Sicily and Italy, it’s even more action-oriented than Spearhead; the final level has you fending off an all-out assault on an old Italian castle. The final, in-engine cutscene is the coolest thing in the whole franchise, a massive airstrike on the castle as it’s overrun by the Nazis, complete with the camera tracking bombs as they plummet to earth.

Medal of Honor: Allied Assault is the kind of game whose reputation lives and dies on nostalgia. It’s one of those games that regularly feature on “favorite games you’ll never play again” lists — and, if I’m being real, most of the rest of the franchise is on there too. That’s just kind of the thing about Medal of Honor: for all its ambition, it crawled so Call of Duty could run. 

 

 -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