jp
Home Talks and Slides My GameLog Research and Projects Publications Resume Teaching
Back  //   GameBreadth Project  //   Game Ontology Project  //   GameLog

Medal of Honor (PS3)

Status: Finished playing
I started playing this game on Saturday 4 June, 2011  //  I stopped playing this game on: Wednesday 18 April, 2012
Current opinion of this game
Nothing terribly special when compared to "the competition".

July 6, 2011 12:48:55 AM
I can see why this game didn't fare too well. I've already finished the campaign and it was an underwhelming experience at best. Not terrible, just not really up to the bar set by Modern Warfare 2. I've been thinking about why that is. Medal of Honor clearly does NOT lack in the polish department, and it's a cool game!

However, I was never really gripped by it. Sure, there were some neat set-pieces and that sort of thing. I guess it's greatest missed opportunity (or perhaps the reason it doesn't shine like MW2?) is that it's based (set in?) an ongoing armed conflict. This was the reason I was most interested in the game...after all, it poses a really hard design problem. How do you portray this in a realistic fashion? (if that's what you want) What liberties can you (should you?) take? What's the point of setting your game in a current and ongoing military conflict?

So, the game's designers TRY to be realistic. Perhaps I should say authentic... This should be part of the hook of the game, and I found that pretty compelling... However, it all fell apart during when most of the game's scenarios play out like 80's war movies! Al Qaeda and the Taliban apparently have thousands of soldiers in the mountains of Afghanistan with unlimited amounts of RPGs... These WEREN'T the battles I had imagined were (are) being fought...the opposing force here didn't attack and then melt away into the mountains or blend in among the local population. They didn't ambush us with IEDs. Of course, I have no idea what is actually going on in Afghanistan and for all I know the missions are all authentic enough... but I just didn't buy it at all. (especially the one where you take out tanks...lots of them!)

So, with the game going for authenticity, and then failing to deliver on it, there really isn't that much more of interest, right?


 
kudos for original design to Rodrigo Barria