Medal of Honor Warfighter – More than just pretty graphics!

Medal of Honor Warfighter PC Review

Let’s say it straight off the bat = Medal of Honor Warfighter does a lot of things right.

Firstly, let’s start with the visuals – aside from the odd low resolution texture here or there, it looks gorgeous. The Frostbyte 2 engine does a great job no matter what is thrown at it, including the driving sections (more on this later). Water effects are particularly good, with torrents of water running from the roof of buildings, and objects actually looking ‘wet’ rather than just the rain hitting them. Character detail is reasonable, although not the best I’ve ever seen Warfighter does a pretty damn good job. I think I prefer the Unreal Engine for the most part, but there isn’t much to complain about.

The areas are as varied as they are detailed, within just a few hours you have gone from a dark rainy night at the docks to a terrorist training camp, dusty streets to driving through a village to a town that is being hit by a storm, that is ripping off trees and buildings and flooding the area. There are a few issues when it comes to fire – it looks ‘off’ when against solid objects such as walls, but overall I find it a minor point. Impressively, the PC version has a lot of visual options allowing players to tweak it to run good on a more modest system.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLO9FEcRpW8
 

Watfighter’s Gameplay

More importantly than the aesthetics, the game handles well. There are options to disable aim assist. Health regens after a period of time – but be warned, you take a high level of damage in this game. If you are shot by a sniper you are going to know about it. Medal of Honor Warfighter places as much on stealth as it does action. Silent kills are generally the best way to go in a lot of situations, it’s more efficient and more importantly, saves hellfire from RPG’s from raining down. Stealth kills can be done by a silenced gun, or perhaps more efficiently a melee attack. Warfighter allows you to vault over objects, go to prone and crawl, and crucially lean (default holding the Left Alt) out of cover. You can peak either left or right, or over cover. Virtually all rifles contain a zoom, and importantly, can be restocked on ammo by asking a team mate. Your pistol (silent as it is) lacks in stopping power so you will want to avoid it unless in certain situations.

Driving in Medal of Honor Warfighter

There are sections of the game where you are expected to do more than command those with 2 legs. Cars and robots are two things you’d better be comfortable with using. Think of the Robot as similar to Metal Gear Solid 4 – only with machine guns and turrets. It controls simply – although the turning is sluggish (although intended to be). The car driving is fairly simplistic – although I did not really find the need to stop the forward key from being held all too often, and rarely did I feel the need to break aside a few very sharp corners. The car does not suffer from the very familiar issue of getting jamming against small pieces of extruding scenery and for the most part was not a chore to drive.

Medal of Honor looking good on the horizon

Overall, Medal of Honor Warfighter contains a solid plot with reasonably wrote dialogue. Thankfully, the voice talent is more than good enough to carry out the task of providing the needed drama. The game splits into various view points, and will even at one point early on have you training as a terrorist. Curiously, this training happens just after the games intro – and so by the point I would hope you would know how to move forward…

EA did well – it is by no means perfect (mostly to do with your team mates AI in single player. At more than one point I was pushed out of cover by a team member only for me to be shot to shit. Another example of poor AI is him warning me of an enemy is behind me (while I am busy shooting 2 others at our front) while he is just chilling out and watching the enemy he just warned me about beat me upside the head…). However this does not make a poor overall experience.

A recommended game – not faultless – but nothing a small patch or two won’t sort out, and more importantly – the game is fun.