Medal of Honor

Dreamworks Interactive

images c/o MobyGames

While it’s not inaccurate to say that Dreamworks Interactive’s 1999 classic shooter Medal of Honor invented the modern World War II shooter, it’s not really the whole picture either. It’s not even the first World War II shooter — even ignoring the abstract, maze-like Wolfenstein 3D, in just the same year as Medal of Honor, TNT Team would release WWIIGI, a Build Engine-based hot mess desperately trying to capitalize on the post-Saving Private Ryan zeitgeist, and Illusion Softworks dropped their cult classic Eurojank milsim Hidden & Dangerous. But Medal of Honor did something none of these games could: bring as close to an authentic-feeling World War II experience as the Sony PlayStation could muster to millions of people.

For a little under a decade, 1999 to 2007, World War II was the theme for some of the most popular shooters, especially in the multiplayer arena. And it all started here, in a game designed under the auspices of Steven Spielberg himself. From the ground up, authenticity was the goal. Everything had to be just right: the look of the game, the feel of the game. The audio design had to be on point. And to an extent, they succeeded. Lifting design concepts heavily from the Nintendo 64 smash hit Goldeneye 007 (right down to the health bar being a red-to-green color gradient,) the weapons are authentic, the bad guys shout at you in real German, there’s cute little briefings before every mission. It went out of its way to make you feel like you were right there, at least by 1990s standards.

…So why does the game feel like something is missing?

To be completely fair: console FPS games were only just starting to get their bearings late in the Sony PlayStation’s life cycle, and while I don’t think they were all that viable until the seventh generation of consoles and Call of Duty 4 showed everyone how it’s done, we can really point to Medal of Honor as the granddaddy of the modern console shooter. It was one of the earliest to make full use of the DualShock’s twin thumbsticks, allowing for a smoother experience, a full two years before Halo and the XBox would prove both Dreamworks and Argonaut (Alien Resurrection, also for PSX) correct that thumbsticks are the ideal way to play FPS games on a console. But these were early days yet, and Medal of Honor, like many of its sequels, feels a little off… almost as if they were so focused on creating an authentic, cinematic experience that they forgot to put an actual game in there.

Or maybe I’m just old, pining for the twistier map designs of Doom and Duke Nukem 3D. But Medal of Honor, for all its authentic trappings, is linear to a fault. For most of your objectives, you don’t have to look for them — most of the time you just stumble upon them on your way to the far end of the level. Even Goldeneye had open-ended maps you could run around in, but here you’re boxed in, put on a rail in a way that not even Half-Life was as blatant about.

Nevertheless, Medal of Honor works overtime to feel real, but it feels real without realism; ammo is type-universal, so your Thompson or BAR will always be fed by the MP40s the Nazis drop, your M1 Garand will happily take German rifle ammo, and so on. The much-vaunted undercover mechanic isn’t as impressive or fun as it sounds, again because of the extreme linearity. And sometimes enemies will teleport right in front of you. Even the shooting is weird: you don’t have a crosshair until you hold down the aim key, which locks you into place, but you’ll be able to lean around corners as necessary.

Medal of Honor tries to be a lot of things, and while I don’t think it succeeds at a lot of those things, it still gets enough right to be superficially fun. You can easily trace the lineage that starts from this game, influences Return to Castle Wolfenstein (bringing that branch of WWII FPS history to full circle) and later carries through Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, and finally jumpstarts Call of Duty, which gives us a direct line to… what is it this year, Black Ops 7? Jesus, I didn’t even finish Black Ops II… Anyway, while I don’t think this game has aged all that well, it’s still an interesting artifact; more than a mere stepping stone, it’s the forging of a new path, the game that launched a new genre and helped shape the future of first person shooter games on whatever platform they may be.

And that’s pretty cool. 

-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