Medal of Honor: European Assault

Electronic Arts Los Angeles

images c/o MobyGames (PlayStation 2 version)

It’s easy to say that Medal of Honor walked so that Call of Duty could run. But the truth is that while Medal of Honor may have been first out the gate, when Call of Duty hit the scene — developed from the ground up as a directly competing product — the older series spent the rest of its lifespan playing catchup. Medal of Honor: European Assault takes a big page from Call of Duty, in all the ways that matter, but it just can’t quite bridge the gap.

The series had been inching in this direction for a while. Medal of Honor: Allied Assault was in some ways a sort of Call of Duty 0; on the console side of things, Rising Sun took a very cinematic turn from the more straightforward Frontline. Pacific Assault marked a turning point for the series, indicated by the change in logo (replacing the classic embossed plaque logo with a more minimalist one utilizing a thin red line in the design.) While Pacific Assault was, broadly speaking, a complete failure on almost every level, it was nevertheless obvious that something had changed; Medal of Honor was no longer just a World War II-themed Goldeneye 64 clone, but had evolved into a full-fledged cinematic warfare game. European Assault tried to blend the two concepts, but in truth it really leans more towards Call of Duty than Medal of Honor 1. Everything just plays more like Call of Duty: each of the 11 levels is an active combat zone, you’ll have ADS (but you can’t move with it), ammo is sorted by weapon, not by broad type (so MP40 ammo won’t fit your Thomson, and so on), you even have up to three buddies (marked by a symbol overhead) who’ll follow you and can be somewhat directed around — it’s simpler than Pacific Assault’s similar system but it’s also more consistently functional.

Medkits you have to pick up are still a thing, but unlike Call of Duty, in addition to smaller health pickups that heal you on the spot, you can store up to 8 medkits that heal about half your health, which you can use on yourself or on your squaddies (keeping them alive guarantees fresh medkits at the start of the next level.) There’s also the nemesis system: each level has one Nazi commander who serves as a sort of boss figure, with his own symbol over his head and high health. Fighting him can be tough, but that’s what the adrenaline system is for: as you rack up kills you fill up an adrenaline bar, and when it’s maxed out, you can unleash it with a press of a button to grant you invincibility, slow-mo and infinite ammo for a brief period of time. But don’t die: while you can earn “revives” that resurrect you on the spot, your adrenaline bar will drop to zero. Most of the maps are pretty open, with a number of optional objectives that you can achieve, you just have to be willing to explore. 

Really, the most obvious links to Medal of Honor’s early spy thriller days is superficial, with you playing an OSS agent who spends the war tracking down a Nazi commander who’s been building a virus bomb he intends to drop on London. It’s otherwise a surprisingly straightforward combat shooter, albeit ahistorical (no Americans participated in the raid on St. Nazaire or were present at the Battle of Stalingrad, not even in an OSS capacity.)

Now, all this sounds pretty fun, right? Not so fast. European Assault has a lot of the same problems as most of the rest of the franchise: it’s primarily a console series at a time when console FPS games were still figuring things out. (In all fairness, being on PC didn’t stop Pacific Assault from being one of the worst games I ever played, but that’s neither here nor there.) Controls are wonky, the graphics aren’t always up to snuff (especially on PlayStation 2,) and sometimes the difficulty spikes are ridiculous, yet you know that if you just had a goddamn mouse you could surmount it no sweat. Whether or not that’s true, the plain point of fact is that the last two levels of European Assault represent one of the biggest difficulty spikes in the series; even playing on the easiest difficulty, you’ll be hard-pressed to get through them. The final boss requires no less than 2 or 3 bazooka blasts to the face.

I liked European Assault, for the most part. There’s something about the earlier games that feel so lifeless — even Frontline’s famous D-Day mission was weirdly empty. European Assault just feels a lot more like a Call of Duty game in all the ways that matter, even if you’re given a little more freedom to do what you want in most cases. Of course that raises the question of what differentiates it from Call of Duty, especially if it’s a little worse at everything Call of Duty does, but at this point, with the series long moribund (that weird VR game notwithstanding) I don’t think the question matters much anymore. For all the series’ faults, I would surely like to see all of the Medal of Honor games remastered for PC — maybe that’s something Nightdive could do? There’s a lot of value to these games, and not even being outclassed by Call of Duty can take that away. 

-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