Medal of Honor Airborne for Xbox 360

Medal of Honor was the game for WWII shooting way back in the day. Long before the market was oversaturated with them, this was the go-to series for nazi hunting. Now these were on Playstation 1, so the graphics weren't the best, but you could still make out the potato masher grenades and the flanks of germans you'd be hitting with every manner of weaponry.

Medal of Honor Airborne continues the tradition, mixes many things up and makes a pretty awesome game that's just not for everyone. The best thing about Airborne is in the title, you drop in via parachute for every mission, selecting your dropzone. The commander shoves you out but it's not very intense, at least not as intense as the game suggests. This is in part because the graphics are pretty bad for 360 standards. It's also because the character models aren't very crisp. The hit detection is off because of this (Shots literally get caught on things like tiny leaves and stop the bullet) and the gameplay almost suffers. I say almost because the gameplay is awesome. Nevermind the generic music, the mediocre presentation and the annoying graphical pop-in that occurs every two seconds.

In MoH: Airborne you're straigtup thrown into an open area battlefield full of nazis and how you opt to go in is up to you. If you opt to land in a safe green zone you'll be out of the fray but you can also tuck your legs in and soar to various other areas like onto the balcony of a building or directly in the center of enemy gunfire.

Every time you die you are dropped back in, so there is a lot of parachuting. You will die quite a bit. Checkpoints only occur after completing an objective, and objectives are surrounded by nazis. Nazis are pretty hard to kill but the controls are awesome. In Airborne, cover is handled exceptionally well. The character turns on a hinge, allowing you not only to peek around corners but up and down in cover simultaneously. I have never seen cover control so fluidly, so points for that. The guns you get are between the very useful and the useless, i.e. those slow reloading ones that every WW2 game seems to have. I don't know what they're called but any gun that forces you to insert individual bullets isn't worth it.

Fortunately weapons are automatically upgraded based on kills. This is an awesome feature and the experience bar on the side indicated by an empty picture of the weapon that slowly fills adds a whole other layer. You can even upgrade your grenades. Speaking of which, the grenades in this game are strange. You seem to start out with about 16 of them but you can only use them by first selecting them with Rb and then opting to throw them. It's a strange creative decision, I understand there are multiple types of grenades but the whole reason you map a grenade to another button is to add easy access and differentiate them from the weapons. Like in Call of Duty, you can cook the grenades and strategically time explosions, and even throw enemy grenades back.

You'll need all the help you can get because death in this game is aggrivating, and your enemies are ravenous. Nazis will charge you in close quarters and the only way to fend them off is by clicking the right stick frantically. You can take a lot of damage depending on the difficulty, but dying is still annoying.

The game is also really short. There are about six missions and they pad them with not allowing you to skip the cutscenes, though they're also short briefing segments. I don't think anybody cares about the story. I've been through about three trillion World War 2 games. With slim exception, the germans lose. Still, you're told x needs to be destroyed or captured and then you go out and do it. Storming a castle and killing all the commanders is a lot of fun, and in fact all of the objectives are fun to complete. I always liked the checklist-order of operations in Medal of Honor games, and your teammates don't give you a hard time. You can run in and complete objectives at your leisure without the story getting in the way- personally I like that.

I have three complaints about this game. The first is that it is very short. The second is that you can't see the map that highlights the enemy redzones when on the field (A HUGE oversight in my opinion) and third, I know it's a port, but I'm waiting for a really good looking Medal of Honor game. This almost looks like an original Xbox game. The multiplayer is pretty cool but I can't find a game online, which is weak.

Overall I think this game is buried under more popular shooters, but it shouldn't be. When it works, it's awesome. The checkpoints are hard to come by and the graphics won't turn any heads (In fact it might be a port even) but the classic MoH gameplay and the really cool open mission structures are fun to parachute into and blow things up. In fact it feels so much like the MoH games that came out ten years ago that it's certainly fanservice as much as a really fun twist on the first person shooter genre. Try it before you buy it, but it is great for what it is.