Medal of Honor: Airborne

The series has been truly moved into the next generation with a step up in visuals, sound quality, and wide-open level design. Thankfully, the gameplay will seem familiar and will be quickly mastered by anyone who's played the series before.

The title has great gameplay and presentation, but the issues that plague it — the sudden inclusion of out-of-place enemies and the woefully unbalanced multiplayer portion —tend to drag down the overall enjoyment level of an otherwise spectacular game.

Medal Of Honour: Airborne may well be as gung-ho as a cigar-chomping drill instructor and as shallow as the pool of blood left by one of your expendable buddies, but it doesn’t profess to be anything more than an exciting and enjoyable week’s worth of FPS action.

Medal of Honor Airborne delivers the most compelling MOH experience in recent years. If you’re looking for a fun, chaotic WWII game this Holiday season, Medal of Honor Airbone is a great choice.

It's not quite as open ended as we'd hoped it would be, but the taste of freedom has whet our appetite for more, and the weapons upgrades keep gunplay fresh throughout the campaign.

Medal of Honor: Airborne is an enjoyable shooter, adding enough to the formula to avoid feeling like a retread of territory you've crossed many times before.

Bear in mind that while the parachuting element is unique, this is still a Medal of Honor game. It doesn’t take first-person shooting to new heights. If you expected something else – if you anticipated next-gen innovation – you’ve forgotten that we live in a time where graphics are currently the most likely game feature to receive an update.

Good job EA, you have finally given a parachute to your declining series and now you are ready to pick yourself up from a botched landing and create a truly next-generation shooter.

What's important, though, is to not get bogged down in the detail too much. It's a game that, when played under pressure, can be a real pain, but taken at your leisure is one to savour.

It's not an instant classic by any means, but even burnt-out veterans should enlist and take the plunge for one more tour of duty. [Oct 2007, p.79]

Yeah, sure, you've been here before, but you've never seen the view from up here. Fortuantely, the game holds up once your boots are on the ground as well.

Quickly it becomes second nature to scavenge the flanks, and poke your gun into every nook and cranny, looking to surprise your enemy or bypass an overwhelming opposition stronghold.

It's easy to forget the most important aspect of any game should be thta it's entertaining, and Medal of Honor is. Sit back, warm up your trigger-finger and enjoy - that is the point after all. [Issue#24, p.70]

If you're a fan of the franchise or just WWII shooters I would still give a strong recommendation to check this game out.

Very engaging missions with excellent use of the environment in strategizing the method of securing victory combine with strong online gameplay for a WWII shooter worthy of the honorable mettle of the 82nd Airborne.

Despite Airborne offering more genuine fun than any of its predecessors, there are only so many ways you can approach the same handful of battles. [Oct 2007, p.108]

Medal of Honor: Airborne is certainly an improvement on what many perceived as a dying brand. It’s not up there yet with the likes of the impending Call of Duty 4, but with a little more innovation and improvements to the online side we can certainly see a return to grace for the once mighty series.

Medal of Honor: Airborne, while not perfect, is definitely the best game in the franchise to come along in quite a while.

Medal of Honor Airborne pushes at the boundaries a bit, but mainly stretches the franchise experience, not necessarily breaking new ground for the game industry as a whole.

The problem is, World War II games are a dime a dozen these days and aside from the increased freedom and highly entertaining multiplayer modes, there isn’t much to make this stand out in the crowded first person shooter genre. It’s certainly a good game, just not as good as it could’ve been.

The lack of narrative finesse and the toning down of the scripted events was a good call. It’s not quite the open world shooter that was promised, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction.

Another expectedly solid title from EA. Unfortunately, a few faults keep it from true greatness.

Combine fictional missions with an unrealized paratrooper advantage, and Medal of Honor: Airborne simply doesn't deliver.

It's single-player may be mediocre, but the online play will put a big exclamation point on the end of your summer. [Oct 2007, p.72]

Medal of Honor: Airborne is great fun while it lasts, however the single player mode is short and it’s doubtful the multiplayer mode will keep the majority of gamers hooked for a long time.

There are some memorable action scenes in Airborne, along with some great visuals and a top-notch presentation. But be careful, because it's over before you know it.

If you want my advice, keep the idea, change the time line, okay?

The first five levels of the six that make up the single player campaign are some of the best that the genre has seen thus far with gameplay that not only fully embraces the open map and vertical gameplay mechanics but also stay at an aggressive yet not overbearing difficulty level.

Medal of Honor: Airborne sprinkles minor moments of brilliance though a minefield of questionable game design. Fans of the series will experience some memorable gunfights, but if you’re a casual gamer looking for a great World War II title, stick with Call of Duty.

A fair presentation of a game that we’ve all played a lot of times before. I’d like to add the additional criticism here that I found the controls very sloppy for an FPS, and almost downright unresponsive during short periods when there was a big explosion or several grenades going off at once.

An enjoyable and solidly designed Nati-fragger, but one with a series of small niggles. [Nov 2007, p.82]

Unfortunately, once you land on the ground after your airdrop, Airborne feels just like any other WWII game that you have played before.

So although it may not be worth a purchase, it’s worth playing around with, if only for a while.

But why is Medal of Honor: Airborne so difficult and unforgiving? Well, that's a debatable point, but this reviewer would hazard a guess that the distinct lack of single-player mission content likely has some bearing on it.

If you're tired of the genre, Airborne won't do anything to change your mind, but if you're looking to fight for the Allied cause yet again, it's a worthy tour of duty.

The multiplayer mode feels tacked on. Rather than come up with new and innovative stuff, EA offers the following game types: Team Deathmatch (highest score wins), Team Deathmatch Airborne (slightly better, with the Allies parachuting in on the Axis team) and Objective Airborne (essentially Capture the Flag).

Airborne has a few tricks up its sleeve, but that doesn't necessarily take it to the next level.

It's still Medal of Honor, and it's still good fun, but it doesn't look or play anywhere near as well as "Call of Duty," and the short campaign somewhat leaves you hanging. [Oct 2007, p.83]

The game can be a little restrictive but the campaign mode is enjoyable and is sure to satisfy World War II FPS fans.

It isn’t inherently awful, but it suffers from being overly average. It also doesn’t help that the best parts of the game take so long to uncover so those of you with short attention spans will likely grow tired of it long before it picks up.

Medal of Honor: Airborne is ultimately made for those who can make it through the lacklustre first half of the game. Persevere and you will be rewarded with some of the best action that WWII shooters have had to offer in a long time.

At the end of the day, Airborne is a competent addition to the series. If you're a fan of these games then most of our complaints will be nothing new to you, and you'll probably approach the new jump mechanic and ostensibly open levels with gusto.

The parachuting mechanic just isn't well-realized enough to levitate this game (ha) beyond its problems, and there are much better titles on the market this year anyways. Skip it.

An adequate FPS but there's not enough originality here for us to recommend it. [Oct 2007, p.68]

Overall, I have mixed feelings about Medal of Honor Airborne. At times the game was fun, but other times there wasn’t too much to hold my attention. The weapons upgrades were nice, but the difficulty of aiming the darn things made me frustrated.

Only tried-and-true multiplayer modes with smooth Net play save this from utter mediocrity. [Oct 2007, p.86]

Whether under the guise of modeling real-world weapon accuracy or not, no excuse rationalizes repeated misses with scoped-in headshots from a sniper rifle.

The presentation is fantastic and the multiplayer is surprisingly fun, but unfortunately Airborne’s new features feel like a desperate attempt to get one more iteration out of this aging series. Medal of Honor: Airborne just screams of a game with lots of interesting ideas that no one actually sat down to play and decide if they were fun.

Medal of Honor: Airborne jumps from it's Xbox 360 rendered C-47 airplane to land in mine field of gameplay issues, mediocre graphics and overused mission objectives.

Aside from the powerful and dynamic sound mix, everything else about Airborne is thoroughly pedestrian.

With AI that require two headshots before they go down, and a dodgy frame rate that for some reason drops when not a huge amount is going on, it lets itself down. The multiplayer is good fun if there’s a room without people using rocket launchers continuously, but again apart from the parachuting the whole affair is pretty generic, although good fun in small doses.

Medal of Honor Airborne offers up some genuinely interesting ideas to freshen up the series and the genre as a whole. It’s just a shame that they are let down by the game’s shoddy mechanics.