Adventures in Discount Gaming: Part 3
The final game in my discount gaming adventure is a doosey. Medal of Honor, oh how you wreck of EA’s worst stenches, but can you redeem the original, by being a good game?
Medal of Honor Warfighter holds the distinction of being the most recent release on this list. In 2012 EA was in the middle of their “let’s copy Call of Duty” business model. Battlefield had moved into a 2 years production cycle, and EA had rebooted the Medal of Honor series to run concurrently with it. Battlefield would be releasing in odd years and MOH in even years. The online of the 2 games were basically identical, it was just a way for EA to leverage two different branded properties and stay in sync with the Call of Duty machine.
The Medal of Honor reboot was not a great game. It was competent, but not great. One of the best ways to describe it was bland. I guess in the grand tradition of that reboot, Warfighter carries that flag high. Warfighter turned out to be the last mail in the Medal of Honor coffin. To say the game was destroyed in the game’s press is really an understatement. The game’s reception was a mockery and it coupled with a some terrible high level decisions at EA, they ended up shuffling upper management around quite a bit.
Is it really that bad? Yeah, I guess. The game has zero personality and it trying to tie itself to real events makes the whole experience uncomfortable. COD takes alot of heat every year for just being yet another military shooter. Even with new world hack, the game still takes a lot of heat every year. The annualization of the franchise is only keep fresh by its rotation of developers. Even though COD takes this heat its not always justified. Usually there’s a bonkers-ass story to go along with the game or meaningful changes to either gameplay or story structure.
Warfighter is COD’s worst criticisms. Take a COD hater and ask them what they don’t like about the series on the surface, they will basically be describing Medal of Honor Warfighter. Outside of it being a sad “also-ran” there’s also a half-baked quality to the entire campaign. many of the firefights didn’t seem to be well play-tested. I was able to flank enemies completely. Like, where was shooting them in the back. I did this about 5 times through story mode.
Also, the check-pointing is horrible. Several times in the game I was surprised at how much I was forced to replay to get back to where I died. One very noticeable spot at the end, right before the hardest breach point in the game, there was no check-point at all. The check-point was after the breach-point. Having died in about 5 secs at that breach-point like 20 times meant that I had to play through a significant chunk of the level about 20 times. Not cool.
Everything from game stability (it locked up on me 3 different times), to graphics (texture pop-in was bad and when they did pop-in they were low-res), to story (the story starts off as vague and muddy and never provides enough details to make it any less of both of those things) to the just general game quality, Warfighter seems rushed, boring, derivative and sad. I’ve played through every level of Modern Combat 4: Zero Hour, that shameless COD of ripoff for mobile devices, and I can confidently say that Warfighter is no better that that game.
As you can see, not every game is created equal and a wide range of games can be found in the discount section right now. There is nothing wrong with Gaming on the cheap, just be ready to play some clunkers. I’ve got a few more I need to burn through before retire my PS3 and 360, but I’m not sure any of them will be as cheap or as bad as some of these games turned out.
