11-Oct-2003 You've got to admire EA. Nothing if not consistent, their ethos of building up a name and then flogging it for all it's worth has brought in millions of dollars and a place at number one in the publisher's league table. Medal Of Honor is the latest franchise to whet EA's financial appetite and despite losing most of the original development team to Infinity Ward (home of MOH rival Call Of Duty), they're ploughing on with Breakthrough - 11 single-player missions spread across Italy and Africa, along with nine multiplayer maps and a new game mode, Liberation (think Jailbreak for Quake III).
Camel's Toe We've been playing some pre-Alpha code of the game, which shows there's still plenty of work to be done, but there's enough going on to suggest that Breakthrough might well turn out to be a cracking play. There are the obligatory new weapons and vehicles (like the Carcano rifle and a British bazooka-style weapon called the PIAT) and the visuals look as good as ever. But it's the philosophy of developers TKO that reeled us in from the off.
The very first mission plunges you into a massively intense firefight in the Kasserine Pass, hampered by a sandstorm and the fact that you've only just installed the game and thought you were going to get a few minutes to acclimatise. Reminiscent of the Omaha Beach landing, the first thing you do is panic and sprint for cover, before inching forward and ridding the world of a few Germans, then getting in a tank and letting rip at bunkers and machine gun nests. As a means of getting your attention it works, and the action doesn't really let up from that point on. Later missions see you storming a fortress in a rowing boat (stop laughing at the back!), fighting running battles through Italian vineyards and ending up at Monte Battaglia where the Allies are outnumbered 100 to 1 - just in case the rowing boats and vineyards had given you the impression the developers had gone soft.
Some flaws remain: it's criminally hard in places (were the Germans really that unerringly accurate, and if so why did they lose the war?), the driveable vehicles haven't materialized (TKO got them working but not to a decent-enough standard), the squad-based parts are pretty erratic and it's still as linear as join-the-dots. But, even at this early stage, it plays brilliantly and the developers seem to have succeeded in making every mission memorable and intense, rather than just concentrating on one or two set pieces. If the next few weeks are spent balancing the difficulty level and tweaking the AI rather than pissing away time playing the new multiplayer maps, Breakthrough could well succeed where most other expansion packs fall.
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