Medal Of Honor: Allied Assault

I started playing Medal of Honor: Allied Assault recently. I've been meaning to for years because from what I heard, it was a pretty good game & helped to revolutionize the modern FPS genre. And I mean, you can pick it up for like $2.49 on GOG.com. Now that I have about 4 hours on it, I certainly have some thoughts I want to share.

Firstly, the flow of the story is weird despite how retroactively clichéd it is. It involves you joining the OSS to help fight against the Nazis. It starts out in the African theatre & quickly transitions into the the western European theatre. I'm sure you've seen a movie or played a game with a very similar storyline. My issue with it though is how abruptly it goes from one mission to the next. I'm sure that this was partly due to the limitations of the engine at the time but there aren't really any characters from what I can tell, aside from the commander giving the briefings & yourself. There is Manon but she seems to only appear in one or two missions so I don't really count her.

What this leaves is this unconnected, isolated feeling of being thrown from one region of war to another. In one mission, you're sneaking behind German lines to assist in rescuing a downed glider pilot then the next you're stuffed into a landing craft next to Private no-name & Captain what's-his-face. As soon as you clear the machine gun bunkers, you're suddenly transitioned into trying to find members of the 101st airborne. I'm not kidding; that's how the game goes. You kill the Nazis on MG-42s gunning down Americans & 10 seconds later, a loading screen shows up & you're told to find a missing paratrooper squad.

A second nit-pick that I have with the game is difficulty. Whenever I play a game with selectable difficulty, I usually pick medium or regular. I assume that this is the intended difficulty the designers wanted people to play on. If that's the case for this game, the designers must have godlike vision. Mission 5 begins with you walking into a French town overrun with Germans. Your mission is to meet up with a tank crew & steal a King Tiger Tank. The first 30 seconds of the mission is nothing you haven't seen before. There's a guy in a window, shoot him, then shoot the gun under the awning below him.

As soon as you turn the corner & try to continue down the street, at least 5 Kar98 rifles ring out & drain your health to near 0. Well, the obvious solution is to slowly peak with your Springfield scoped rifle & counter them. Surprisingly, that's what you're supposed to do. And apparently, you're also supposed to die 50+ times while you're trying to look through the 5 pixel wide hole in the tree sprite just so you can figure out where the first enemy is.

I'm no game designer. I can critique & praise games for all I want but my words shouldn't be taken as gospel. This, however, is complete & utter BS. Snipers in this mission are nearly impossible to see. There's no scope glare. There's no muzzle flash. And your friendlies don't call out sniper locations. The only real way to detect an enemy sniper is to slowly crawl towards a window & see where standing in the window gets you shot. All you have to do after that is just keep peaking the window with your scope up so you can scan the building you think you're getting shot from. Of course, there's no guarantee you'll see them the first time because they're probably crouching & only their grey helmet is visible against the slightly lighter grey fog.

There is also a foliage visibility issue that can hide enemies from you while they can see you perfectly. That though, I think I can chock it up to a mod I installed so I can actually play at a reasonable 16:9 resolution. The "read me" file in the mod says it cranks everything up to ultra so maybe if you didn't have foliage up that high, you'd stand a better chance.

I haven't quite beat the game quite yet so I'm not comfortable giving it a final, solid rating. I've been having a decent amount of fun with it bar some sections. It scratches that particular itch I have for early 2000s, cliché WW2 shooters. A sharp, polygonal M1 Garand does things to me. Since the game can be found for so cheap, I'd say to pick it up if you have that same itch. Personally, I think that at least the very first 2 Call of Duty games blow this game out of the water though.

If I had to give Medal of Honor: Allied Assault a rating at this very moment, I'd give it a 7.5/10. I haven't completed it yet so maybe there's a mission that will impress so much I'll call the greatest game ever made. I highly doubt it but anything is possible.