Medal of Honor: Airborne Review

8.8

Format PC

Developer Electronic Arts

Publisher Electronic Arts

Genre First Person Shooter

14 Comments

Between all the bullets and fire, the blood and the remarkably manly shouting, believe it or not there was a point while reviewing this where I was almost struck by something poignant. Almost.

Bear in mind this was before I'd realised quite how much action EA were keen to pack into this, the latest iteration of their single-player, lone wolf WII FPS... actually, packing action into a lone wolf sounds perverted. Let's just say it was long before Airborne had introduced the insane turbo-Nazis who take four shotgun blasts to the face to kill.

It was on the first level, after making my first airdrop into a little Italian town and blowing up one of the anti-aircraft guns. I was Boyd Travers, champion of the United States 101st Airborne division. I was also cocky, and promptly got my brains emptied out by a sniper. And I respawned... in the air, parachuting back down to earth again, but my objectives list told me the AA gun was still blown up.

For a while I thought that Airborne had made a bold move - that every time you died you'd slip into the boots of just another grunt, plummeting down from the skies into the meat grinder.

I began to wonder if my reckless heroics as Travers were indicative of the way many young soldiers had died during World War II. Then as soon as I touched down in the midst of a group of friendly soldiers I heard a chipper bark of "Hey Travers! Glad you made it."

The clue's in the title. This is a Medal of Honour game, which means it's WWII lite, but this time it's... airborne. So you can choose where to land at the beginning of each level (and after most of your deaths) as you guide your parachute down to earth. The airdrops themselves don't play as large a role as you'd think.

Your speedy descent and limited control (not to mention some invisible walls) mean there's only a set circle, or 'dropzone' where you can land, and the drop itself is over in a few seconds. What's significant about Airborne is, perversely, what happens on the ground.

This is a series which has always been as linear and organised as an English queue, and when you let the player start anywhere, even if it's only within one chunk of the level, for that chunk at least you're going to have to do something different. And Airborne does, with aplomb.

It scatters pockets of fiendish Axis troops in houses, on streets, by strategic objectives and up towers, puts them behind machineguns and sandbags, then randomly drops a couple of dozen American troops down and lets God (and you, natch) sort it all out.

Refreshing isn't the word. It's hugely satisfying to bypass the kind of fortified machinegun posts we've wrestled with a hundred times before by landing on an upper balcony or - and this is a crazy concept - going around the damn thing.

And when you've just started a mission and have plenty to get on with it's nice to steal away from a firefight to do something else when you don't fancy your chances. Which you'll find yourself doing quite a bit, because within the drop zone the level designers don't have their trademark omnipotence, so the fights aren't always fair and don't just have the odd tough scrap thrown in to keep you on your toes.

In other words, the chaos will occasionally cough up instances where victory in a linear game would be a nightmare to achieve. But this is a good thing, because we're not playing a linear game and anyone with a dose of smarts can usually figure out a way around the problem.

We've seen wide open singleplayer FPS games before, but they've never had this pace or this lust for physical player freedom where every building and every rooftop has been designed to work like a bullet playground.

Thanks to the density of Airborne's dropzones you're always stumbling across supply drops or skirmishes as you wind your way to an objective. There's always a German snuggled down behind cover around the next corner, or a sniping nest which gives you a panoramic view of your pals taking a whipping.

Then there are the Skill Drops. Marked out by draped or snagged parachutes, these are special locations that make exceptionally cool landing sites. For example, managing to land through the window of a mansion or the back door of an occupied pillbox.

The sort of thing only a complete psycho (read: hero) would attempt and that most people would botch horribly. The game boldly announces the name of each drop as you walk into it, which makes you feel pretty suave until you realise you still need to parachute into it for it to count.

Unfortunately, that's just the dropzones. More unfortunately, lots of your objectives aren't in the dropzones. Most unfortunately of all, as soon as you leave the dropzones you can actually hear the developers breathe a big sigh of relief and you're instantly funnelled down a linear stretch towards whatever it is you have to blow up or kill to complete the mission.

It's not so bad as to make you feel claustrophobic - Airborne's linear paths are usually pretty broad by FPS standards, but it's disappointing. It's far too rare that a game not only attempts something unique, but it really, really works; and while it's understandable the Airborne developers didn't push the idea anywhere near as far as they could have it's pathetic how quickly they scamper behind what's tried and tested.

The devs have done a great job of giving each of the game's six sizeable missions a different colour palette and feel, but all of them end by squeezing you down a road to a final, major objective, and the moment that happens you even stop respawning in the air and the game becomes Medal of Honour: Not Airborne. And that includes the game's climactic ending.

It's made worse because while you don't notice Airborne's almost total lack of setpieces or narrative when you're building your very own setpieces and narrative through the open ended dropzones, things can feel pretty dry when you're nudged down the straight and narrow.

The scant few cutscenes sure do have nice motion capture and angry voice acting but they adhere brain-burningly strictly to WWII movie clichés. You know the ones. If someone tries to run, they die, if someone tries to save someone else, they both die, if someone cracks a joke absolutely everyone dies immediately and brutally and there are no survivors and that is the horror of war do you see?

Fortunately Airborne is a first-person shooter, and so is able to sneakily rectify all its flaws by being really fun when you shoot people from a first-person perspective. How about that?

And yes, the guns are satisfying and sound absolutely gorgeous, and yes, the difficulty level is rarely frustrating but most of the time harsh enough to leave your adrenaline pumping and make every kill satisfying, and... well, while the AI's no great shakes and frequently sticks its gun around cover and attempts blind-firing when you can see parts of their body anyway, that doesn't harm things too much. Because this is also a casual game, but it took me a while to figure that out.

When I first started playing I was ready to be a little harsher to it, but I was playing it wrong. I was landing where the signal flares told me, creeping about with my rifle, sticking close to other American soldiers and generally avoiding death like only a true coward can.

Most tellingly of all I got annoyed when my immersion was ruined by an otherwise great graphical glitch where the arms of dead men would get snagged on a fences and grow to the size of pythons. In the end I could feel the creeping anaesthesia-like feeling in my head that tells me I'm getting bored, so I decided to juice things up a bit.

Next time I spawned I valiantly tugged on my parachute and had it send me all the way behind enemy lines, right beside the fuel tanks I had to blow up. I was going to land lost, alone and surrounded, but that sounded better than being bored. The shooting started immediately.

I responded by throwing all my grenades in random directions and leaping behind a piece of cover that turned out to have a Nazi behind it. A rifle-butt duel followed that had all the grace of a ladies' slap fight, but when the Nazi did the polite thing and died I realised I had a perfect view of a fuel tank. Bemused, I proceeded to detonate the thing with a few shots from my rifle.

What I learned was, the more freedom you give the player, the less opportunity the devs have to make things exciting. The Airborne team understood this and didn't want players dropping somewhere that wouldn't make for an adventure, so they built a game that was fast and simple, where playing a skilful maniac is actually a really efficient tactic.

When you're sprinting you avoid a lot of fire, health packs are everywhere and, most importantly, when you advance into an area bad guys stop spawning there. There are loads of occasions throughout the game where drawn-out firefights can be over in an instant if you just bravely blitz through them.

This almost arcadey game design is clear in a couple of things. First, there's the obligatory disorientation effect of getting caught in an explosion, which ends up acting more like blurry bullet time than anything remotely disabling. Second, there's Airborne's Weapon Experience system.

Every time you kill in Airborne, the icon of the weapon you're wielding fills up a tiny bit. It fills up a little more if you get a headshot and a lot more if you string kills together. Fill it up completely and you get an addition to that weapon, such as a special clip, bayonet, set of sights or grenade launcher, and if you complete an objective in the mission your weapon experience progress is saved.

Sounds simple? It is, much more so than the in-depth weapon customisation we were promised. Is it fun? Definitely. It's undeniably neat when you take the top of someone's head off, everything goes into slow motion and you're told what goodie you've unlocked. Is it addictive? Embarrassingly so.

But you'll find this out for yourself when you realise your skill with German grenades only needs a few more kills and you start sadistically herding enemies into corners. Or when you begin religiously using only your pistols because you've maxed-out everything else.

And that's Airborne all over. Pretty simple, pretty fun, pretty, and addictive in a way you wouldn't expect from a WWII FPS. The medals, stars and Skill Drops you haven't got are waved in your face at the end of each level, and while the dropzones only make up part of each map they still add a fair heft of replay value to the package.

You could say it's a shame Airborne doesn't make more of the paratrooper subject matter that it flaunts so much. Realistically you'd imagine the synchronised dropping of hundreds or thousands of men under fire to be, well, a mess, and historically it often was. EA could have had fun with that, throwing in plane wrecks, logistical nightmares and men dangling uselessly from trees, rather than having every mission go exactly as it is described in the briefing and having you in total control of every jump.

There was a chance here to provide an insight into the world of those men who signed up for an experimental division of the army that was, at the time, considered as mad as beans. Instead we get a minute inside the plane at the start of each map and a novel respawning system.

But you can't get too moody at Airborne because it honestly thinks it knows what we want and it does a good job of delivering the goods.

This game has been built for people who want to soar down into the middle of an enemy encampment and single-handedly pistol-whip two dozen dastardly Nazis into submission, then have a quick check of the compass to see what direction to shoot in next. And not-so-deep down, isn't that all of us?

Quintin Smith