I enjoy my first person shooters.  Not necessarily for the online play, but more for the campaign than anything.  I like to take my time through the campaign and soak up the story, and explore where I can.  I’m also glad to see EA bring the Medal of Honor franchise into the modern era of combat.  Moreso, I enjoy how they presented it to the player (and not how the media perceived it).

Through the campaign, you play primarily from the point of view of three soldiers.  A DEVGRU Operator callsigned “Rabbit”, a Delta Force sniper, callsign “Deuce”, and U.S. Army Ranger Dante Adams.  Following their three smaller stories as part of the bigger whole.  As you play through the game, you are dropped into a number of operations in the country of Afghanistan to combat the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and mercenary fighters.  The events of which are supposedly loosely based off of the events of Operation: Anaconda.The story is very solid and you get a real sense of comraderie between the characters involved.  As you’re fighting alongside your AI brothers, there’s a lot of dialogue to keep the story flowing beyond the typical “move to checkpoint, enable cutscene” type stories.  And while I burned through the game in about five hours on Medium, which to me felt about right, I was still sad to see it end.

This is where MOH takes a real hit.  While for the most part the gameplay was very solid, and the controls very intuitive, there are a few glitches in the game that I found somewhat annoying.For one, the environment boxes really needed to be more fine tuned in the game.  There were areas where I would run into an invisible wall a few feet before hitting the environment wall, mostly in canyon areas.  It was also very frustrating that some spots where I felt I should have been able to jump over (such as windows with blown out roofs) I was not, and some areas where I should have been able to sneak around a building to flank an enemy, I was not allowed to run around.  I found myself more than once taking rounds while trying to figure out how to navigate through a map.Spawn points for the enemies at times were just plain retarded.  In a couple of missions I was actually able to sneak around behind the enemy spawns, and just gun the soldiers down as they appeared.  While amusing the first time or two, I quickly became annoyed at how easily I was able to do this in some areas.

Last but not least, I encountered framerate and sound crashes a couple of times.  Not where the game crashes or locks up, but rather the framerate just takes a dive and the sound goes the heck for a quick second.  In my two encounters of this happening, it didn’t really affect the gameplay, but I was surprised at the lack of polish for such a big title release.In

Overall I enjoyed Medal Of Honor’s campaign.  The story was well done and for the most part the gameplay was enjoyable with its minor hitches.  But if you were to ask if I would pay for it new again?  I would most likely say “no”.  It would be better if you waited for it to hit the $19.99 rack.  While many people play the game just for the multiplayer (which I’ll be reviewing later this week), I cannot see the justification of buying this new on the shelf.I give this game’s campaign a 2.5/5.