Medal Of Honor: Airborne review for PlayStation 3

War games, they’re all the same aren’t they? Guns, checkpoints and bad guys with funny accents. Well, Medal of Honor: Airborne aims to change this a little with a new idea, parachutes.

Chute me down!
Ok, so the parachutes are only used at the beginning of the game, but it means you can choose to land in a safe area, on a rooftop or even in the thick of the enemy directly on top of your next objective. The latter is only for the brave, though, as the rest of your squadron will take a while to get to you, meaning that you’ll be on your own against a horde of enemies.

Objective Objectives
While it seems more common these days, when Airborne first arrived it was unusual to be able to choose your next objective. Do you take out the gun turret first or go for the ground troops? The choice is yours and the parachute allows you to get a good position ready for the assault.

Even after you’ve died, which you’ll do a lot in this game, you can just parachute back in, any objectives completed will still be kept, so you can just choose another position and try again. It works well but does feel a little like cheating at times.

Playing on the standard difficulty gave me a fair few screens of death before completing objectives on the first few maps so higher settings are for serious veterans only! It does give you a casual option, though, which should offer a good starting point for new FPS players willing to fight the cause against the Nazis.

The view from the Roof
The game maps are pretty well laid out and graphically quite pleasing, especially as you come in from the air and slowly float down to a particular point, taking in all the fighting around you.

There are, however, noticeable issues with tearing and invisible walls making the game look a bit rushed in places. With so much going on, it probably isn’t surprising that there are a few bugs in the game. At one point I landed on a roof, only to find that I’d slipped right through into a room without the roof giving way. It’s not much but sometimes it can be annoying.

Nasty Nazis
Yes, those despicable Nazis are back as the flavour of the month and they’ll try their best to stop you at all costs. Well, that’s not strictly true. The AI means that while some will hunt you down, most of them are quite content to sit behind a wall far enough away to let the shots go right over you, but near enough for you to take easy pot shots at them. They hardly ever muster up the courage to come over to where you are crouching, even if you stand completely still.

Despite this, the few who do get closer are no push-overs and will challenge all but the most seasoned players before they reach their objectives. Rooftops are the key as they’re often bereft of the enemies and a few jumps will take you half way across the map. The snipers might have something to say about this, though, and I’ve noticed they love to take pot shots at rooftop fans.

Up Up and Online
The single player is long enough to keep most FPS fans busy for a few days at least, but the multiplayer is where the fun really starts. Playing against other human players means that rooftops are no longer a safe place to hide from the enemy, pretty soon someone will come along after you.

Battles on the great open maps are frantic and fun. There aren’t too many different weapons and no vehicles to speak of, but the open-ness and roof jumping certainly more than make up for this. For an older game there were surprisingly quite a few players still playing this online as well, which is probably testament to how fun this game actually is as a simple multi-player war game.

Call of Duty Lite?
Medal of Honor: Airborne is pretty much an arcade FPS with a few nice ideas. It’s not as sophisticated as something like Call of Duty but the parachutes make it worth picking up and add a new strategy element to the genre.

Ultimately, Airborne is a good fun game with a few niggles offset by a few good novel ideas.

8/10

Having completed this game on the hardest game, it gets pretty fustrating at times. Team AI is terrible. No one takes the initiative to push forward and no one attempts to cover me when i'm forced to do all the work.

Its not helped when the AI somehow realises this and starts shooting solely at you. For example i ran into a battle where both sides were shooting at each other. When i appeared, the nazis decided to all shoot at me. I was turned into swiss cheese pretty quickly.

The cover system is a bit rubbish as well. Crouching behind a wall will stiill get you shot. Instead, you have to hold the crouch and prone buttons together. The other issue is leaning. Its hard to explain COD managed it fine, but Airborne seems a little off (i can't remember why).

Oh and you just gotta love the spawning in this game, with limited health then endless spawning annoyed me like hell. People popping up out of no where. If i had self healing it would be fine, but with the odds stacked so heavily against you, it can test ones resolve.

But there are certainly some excellent set pieces. The dday mission is a highlight with all the trenches and bunkers to flush out and the flak tower outside was good. And of course, battering someone with a grenade is satisfying.