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History is written by the winners. When video game historians want to talk about that brief fascination with World War II in the first person shooter space, they’re going to look to Call of Duty. Call of Duty eclipsed its competition, reshaped the industry and made itself the face of military shooters, regardless of perceived realism. It was such a big deal that even Medal of Honor — which walked so Call of Duty could run — tried to get in on it. The end result: Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault, a game that tries to be many things, and fails at all of them. No wonder people talk about Call of Duty instead.
Many years ago I played through Pacific Assault. It was one of the most gruelingly unenjoyable experiences I’d ever had in my life. As I recall, I wound up just cheating my way through the final levels, I was that fed up with it. When I picked it up for a replay, I was seven years older, several relatives lighter, and multiple traumatic experiences more jaded. I was also just a little bit better at video games. I learned what Pacific Assault wanted me to do: play it slow, play it careful. And I found that as long as I kept my head down and didn’t rush headlong into things, the game was just a little bit smoother. But here’s the thing: no matter how careful you are, no matter how safe you play, your death is inevitable, inexorable, because this game is so full of bad design decisions beneath a serious lack of quality control that it becomes a teeming nest of teeth-gritting frustration.
Pacific Assault, as the name suggests, moves away from the traditional European theater of previous Medal of Honor games (and, indeed, most World War II shooters in general) and instead places the action in the bloody island hopping campaigns of the Pacific theater. Like most other games in the franchise, you play a single character, a fellow named Tommy Conlin, a United States Marine, going on a journey from bootcamp just prior to America’s entry into the war, to the disaster at Pearl Harbor, then Makin Atoll, Guadalcanal, and finally the battle of Tarawa. The game tries to build characterization between Tommy and his buddies, but there is so little of it that they almost ought to have not bothered. Instead of a powerful cinematic story we get a bunch of generic jarheads who barely have enough characterization to fit into archetypes. So we’re left playing this for the gameplay and that’s just a mistake.
Pacific Assault sits at the uneasy confluence of two urges. On the one hand, it wants to be a cinematic arcade experience, like Call of Duty. On the other, it wants to be a realistic shooter. Ultimately, it sucks at both. In a weird sort of way it’s sort of a symbol of a lot of what was wrong with shooters at the time, as the genre was somewhat in transition. 2004 was also the year that gave us FarCry, Doom 3, and Half-Life 2; these were big titles that really pushed the envelope on video game graphics, and Pacific Assault, utilizing LithTech Jupiter (not id Tech 3, despite saying so in the credits… I know id Tech 3 and this was definitely not an id Tech 3 game!) tried to follow suit… but despite a lot of of then-popular graphical bells and whistles it doesn’t really look much better than Call of Duty. It wants to be Call of Duty so fuckin’ bad — it introduces ADS (a first for the series,) it’s constantly loud and noisy, you’re accompanied by a revolving door of NPC buddies (a big change from the Goldeneye 64-style gameplay the series was known for up to this point) and there’s even blood, another first for the franchise. And yet it completely fails to achieve anything that made Call of Duty memorable in the first place.
There’s a lot about
Pacific Assault that’s just jank. From
bad texture and model pop-in to crappy animations to shitty ragdolls to just
plain weird bugs like sometimes your weapon’s firing sound getting stuck upon
reloading your save until you fire it again, there’s a real budget game feel
to this title, which makes me feel like I’m taking crazy pills — this is
Medal of Honor, one of the biggest shooter franchises of the 2000s! Shit, I’ve played
actual budget games that weren’t this goddamn janky. But you know
what? I could tolerate the cosmetic stuff. I can tolerate the game making an
enemy soldier go through two wildly different death animations in a row before
collapsing into a ragdoll that promptly goes flying across the clearing. But
there are some serious flaws here with hit detection and enemy AI that combine
with a particularly galling design decision to drive this game from merely
mediocre to spectacularly awful. It’s got some of the worst hit detection I’ve
ever seen; far too many times you’ll shoot an enemy and it’ll just go right
through him, while he can hitscan you with impunity. Worse than that, so often
you’ll be taking hits and it’s impossible to know where they’re coming from
because the directional damage indicators don’t work properly. Most of the
time, the red arrow shows up suggesting it’s coming from behind, because the
game doesn’t actually register the bullet collision until it’s passed through
you. Sometimes you’ll just get all four directions at once and it’s impossible
to even begin to guess where the enemy fire is coming from. And don’t think
hiding behind cover will help you — sometimes enemy fire will just clip right
through it, because fuck you that’s why. Worse yet, the enemy AI will often
prioritize you, concentrating all their fire on you while ignoring your NPC
buddies — who themselves will often just stop firing or sometimes get stuck on
the path behind you! (And before you ask, no, there’s no grenade indicator
either.)
As bad as this is, it could be tolerable, theoretically, right? Right? Just play on easy, bro, it’ll be fine! Except… okay, when you’re just starting out, enemy fire will obviously just bounce off you. One bullet = 1% of your health. Fair enough. You shoot a guy, and assuming the hitboxes are on your side, he dies in one hit. But by the end, you’ll be shooting him three, four times, while every bullet shaves off between 7 to 25% of your health. Why is this a fucking thing!? Who thought driving the difficulty numbers up as you progress was a good idea?!
And don’t think you have regenerating health to help you; one of your NPC buddies is Jimmy the medic, looking a bit like an undercooked Charlie Berens. Slap the medic button and he’ll come over and heal you… ostensibly, anyway, so long as he has enough supplies (you get up to four revives per level.) But sometimes he won’t do that. Sometimes he’ll prioritize one of your NPC buddies instead. Sometimes Charlie Berens will just let you fucking die. But if you do get a revive, enjoy it… because sometimes you’ll just lose half your health immediately anyway. At the very least, though, at least the medic button sometimes works; the game provides you with other keys to guide your squad — directing them to advance, retreat, regroup or give covering fire, but here’s the thing: none of those buttons reliably do anything. Your NPC buddies just do whatever the fuck they want.
This game is an abject failure. Most of the game is repetitive, long treks through samey-looking jungles and extended combat sequences that go on way too long; the rare moments where it does something different tend to be even more frustrating, like you’re being punished for wanting something new. Special mention must be given for the airplane sequence, where you’re suddenly expected to learn how to fly a plane with realistic controls (using a mouse to steer — because fuck you, that’s why) and dogfight with Japanese Zeroes. And if you can get through that, you’re rewarded with the Battle of Tarawa chapter, which is honestly the perfect encapsulation of the brutal, bloody grind of the Pacific campaign: a long nightmare that punishes you for every fucking inch of ground. American troops died in droves to take Tarawa Atoll, paying for its conquest in blood. You’ll be paying for it in presses of the quickload button.
The only thing I can even really say I enjoyed is the soundtrack, an
interesting mix of the expected bombastic orchestral stuff with some
traditional Japanese instrumentation. There’s also a little bit of an attempt
at period authenticity, with real radio broadcasts from the era on the main
menu screen (here depicted as a gradually evolving base camp where the camera
moves to various positions for each section of the menu, in
Medal of Honor tradition.) If you
bought the game from GOG you might wonder what the “supplementals” menu is
supposed to be… as it turns out, there was a rerelease of the game called
Director’s Edition that adds the traditional behind-the-scenes vids and
veteran recollections. This is one of the few things to distinguish
Medal of Honor from its brethren and
it’s really insult to injury that the original release lacks this.
I’ve played a lot of World War II games. It’s a theme that has held endless fascination for most of my life, probably ever since I found a copy of Elie Wiesel’s Night in the guestroom night stand. But Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault has the dubious honor of not just being one of the worst World War II shooters in existence — yes, even worse than WWIIGI — but being perhaps the worst game I’ve ever played. Seven years, hundreds of reviews, three family deaths, two presidents, seven moves (three of them cross-country), two hospital visits, three partners, multiple ended friendships and a new computer later, I sit here, having finished Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault once more (I didn’t even cheat this time!) and nothing has changed: I still hate this game with every fibre of my being.
I wish nothing but ill on the people who made this game. My only consolation is that in a thousand years this game will be lost to history along with all our society’s other endeavors, dreams and petty little worries.
-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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