Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond

Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond is a show from beginning to end, an experience that invites the user to fully experience it, a full background with it and the possibilities it offers us, in short: to be lived. Its great variety of missions, with a long-lasting campaign that revisits some of its best scenarios is its main asset. To all this adds its multiplayer and survival modes, something that makes the total package very complete.

Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond, if nothing else, represents a symbolic step forward for VR game platforms like the Oculus Quest 2. It’s the closest thing to a AAA title I’ve played on my headset yet. I don’t know if its nearly-50GB file size is warranted given the so-so visuals, but I did have a lot of fun with the Campaign missions. I’ll still wait a while for the multiplayer to work out its kinks, but I can see myself enjoying that eventually, too. All in all, I’m not sure if Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond would do Grandpa proud, but if you own an Oculus Quest 2, it’s a fun experience and worthy of your time.

Bland plot (which prevents Above and Beyond from being a truly magnificent experience) and somewhat cartoonish characters did not spike the game’s guns. I was impressed with the scope and details of the environments, and gunplay was awesome because the weapons have a nice kick to them. If only the controls were better… I lost count of the situations when I picked up a wrong object or ended up giving myself an injection instead of throwing a grenade. [02/2021, p.62]

Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond has a few faults; however, the excellent campaign more than makes up for it with over-the-top scenes galore.

Above and Beyond’s gunplay is tight, the VR controls and interactions are vast, varied, and engaging. Moreover, the campaign itself is an extensive gallery of both history and creativity combined into a gripping World War 2 campaign that pays reverence to both the experiences of those who lived through the war and the foundation of Medal of Honor as a whole.

The essentially well-made VR shooter borrows from the Medal of Honor classics, yet shows flaws in its execution.

A competent shooter in virtual reality. Somewhat oversimplified in the use of guns and vehicles but nonetheless more than worthy of your time, if you like shooting Nazis.

With a greater focus on optimization, environmental interaction and singleplayer cohesion, Above and Beyond would surely have deserved a glittering medal of honor.

Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond marks a successful return of the license in virtual reality, but the transition to this new media still needs some work. If it clearly plays the realism card to offer us a show worthy of the biggest productions of the genre, it unfortunately does not always achieve its goals in terms of immersion. An improved optimization and some German dubbing would be more than welcome. In the meantime, the atmosphere is present, with quality graphics, many animations and an epic soundtrack. We also appreciated the classic but efficient multiplayer mode.

Well-paced and rather long, Medal of Honor: Above & Beyond tastes like a good B series: the actors are not very good, the German accent is approximate, some sets are in cardboard boxes, but we take real pleasure in wreacking havoc on enemy lines.