Super Nerd Sundays Presents: MoH? More Like Meh.

Medal of Honor’s reboot is bad. It’s one of the rare games that makes me want to re-write my genocidal shooter piece to account for the bodycount per soldier in this game. I haven’t been keeping close track, but I’m pretty sure I already killed more people in Medal of Honor than I did as a time controlling super-soldier in Fear 3. If this is a realistic portrayal of war, as it supposes itself to be, it’s amazing that anyone is left alive in Afghanistan to still fight. Apparently the bog standard Ranger insertion involves dozens of people dying as they run off of helicopters while a group of four Rangers rack up a body count in the thousands to make up for their lackluster entrance. These enemies are relentless, fearless, and self-less, constantly throwing themselves at me and my group of apparently invincible co-soldiers regardless of how inane the objective we’re holding really is. Although perhaps the partially destroyed mud hut I was defending was a key tactical resource which, if left in American hands, will almost certainly win us the war in Afghanistan.

All of this would be enough to make Medal of Honor a game bad, but it kicks it up a notch by throwing in some pretty weird sexism. Every character is either a man or a literal object upon whom ideas of traditional masculine and feminine roles are projected. In the aforementioned mission as a Ranger, perplexingly named Dante Adams in a half hearted attempt to realistically represent the makeup of our armed forces, a woman flying an Apache saves your group of Rangers from the outlandish standoff I outlined above. Then the Rangers extol her graces while she, as a woman, displays her disinterest and inability to understand flirting. Women, right?! Luckily a man steps in to clear things up for her: the Apache pilot who just killed dozens of enemies to save her comrades just doesn’t understand warriors. You know what he means, ladies.

Then I’m placed in control of another male character, just in case I be asked to relate to a woman who fights in our wars, who works with the aforementioned female Apache pilot. I then am placed behind what appears to be a magic camera which shifts inexplicably, regardless of location, to various screens where I can navigate finite spaces to kill enemies who cannot shoot back at me. This is that “shooter without the challenge” bit I mentioned before. There’s a little bit of risk in another scene, where I’m asked to protect the silly female Apache pilot, who almost get shot down (probably because of some vaginal issue that distracted her during combat) and to top it all off my name is Brad during this sequence. It’s offensive on nearly every level. I mean, who the fuck is named Brad?

Medal of Honor is the sort of game that sociologists want to make Mass Effect, Grand Theft Auto and Dragon Age into. Childish, ignorant of the larger factors surrounding the story it’s attempting to tell, poorly designed and so aggrandizing of violence that it makes Call of Duty 6 look careful and considered in its portrayal of terrorism. You don’t need a psych degree to see the seams in its structure, the manner in which it moves from masculine image to masculine image, occasionally accompanying these images with little captions that make things sound a little more impressive just in case the fact that you’re playing a game where you shoot an endless supply of people in the face didn’t make you feel empowered enough. You’ll also spend the bulk of the game as what is called a “Tier 1 AFO.” I’ve been too lazy to Wiki that acronym but I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to make me impressed. Tier 1 sounds like it might be the highest tier there is. Or the lowest, I’m not sure. If it’s related to beard growing, judging by my military teammate’s impressive facial hair, I’m guessing it’s the highest.

In fact, the nicest thing I can say about Medal of Honor is its beards. It has some of the best beard technology I’ve seen in recent memory. Beards are bushy, they’re thick, they’re full and they’re well rendered. Beards look better than the awkward plastic cast of characters I’m asked to sympathize with during each drawn out, unfortunate cutscene. And the beards make more sense – they’re beards, they grew, and someone’s face was cold, so here they are. There’s a logical point of origin, there’s a logical purpose, and a logical outcome to the entire beard process. I wish I could say the rest for Medal of Honor’s storytelling.

But that’s low hanging fruit. If I was going to knock every game with a bad story I wouldn’t be able to love games like Painkiller, with delightfully absurd stories that feature devil bikers assaulting me on my journey into Hell to recover Eve from the Devil so I can ascend to heaven and chill out with my wife (true story!). What makes Medal of Honor’s story bad is how serious it is, how dedicated to its own fiction it seems and how much it wants to recast the United States as an underdog in Afghanistan, which, let’s face it, is a war which is both difficult to talk about and which makes us reconsider who we are in a national stage. If you want to make a game about patting yourself on the back, you don’t want to set it in Afghanistan. And it’s offensive how thoroughly they from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare’s (surprisingly good) story about the heartless nature of war without ever approaching the vicious poignancy that Modern Warfare managed.

All of this could be forgiven in a game with competently executed shooting. But Medal of Honor doesn’t even get that right. Instead it is populated by a handful of toothless guns which fit into traditional roles. You’ll have a shotgun, a few assault rifles, two sniper rifles (one for good guys and one for bad guys) and some machine guns that work more or less like assault rifles and are mostly indistinguishable from each other. There’s no personality to any of the guns, and the options for the arsenal in the single player game are pretty limited. You’ll occasionally have a chance to pick up an enemy weapon, but since your default guns have unlimited ammo so long as you ask your teammates nicely there’s never any reason to use any of the AKs you see generic terrorists dropping left and right.

Occasionally you’ll be asked to use special weapons like laser pointers that make missiles and big bullets fall from the sky, which is supposed to mimic the JSOP program’s impact on warfare. My personal favorite moment involving these “joint munitions” scripted sequences so far came when I had to suppress a machine gun nest in order to allow my allies to throw a smoke grenade into said nest so that an airstrike could remove it. The notion of just using a normal grenade, or marking our own position so that we could be avoided never occurred to my squad-mates, which is just as well because I’m pretty sure I killed the guy manning that machine gun before the bombs ever hit him during the process of firing something like a thousand fucking bullets at him.

This sort of comical excess and convoluted force is clearly intended to ape Modern Warfare’s famed C-130 scene, as is the camera-switching Apache bit. It’s supposed to make you feel like you’re part of a bigger army doing big army stuff, but the end result is a laughable design touch that fails at making any sort of point and just isn’t very fun compared to other things I could be doing. With invulnerable generic teammates, unlimited ammunition and constantly regenerating health seeing me through every conflict, I can just barely force myself to scrape by each level and view a brief missive about life behind the front lines to see how a white man in a suit who I think is some sort of general is ruining the war for a black man in a uniform who is definitely some sort of colonel. And then I’m hurled into a battle against an endless stream of terrorists who I assume are hell-bent on destroying America and her delicious freedom pies. The end result is some of the most generic gameplay and dialogue that I’ve had the displeasure of engaging over the last few months. It’s clear that Medal of Honor wants to ape other, better games: it recalls Battlefield 2, which bursted with personality, and Modern Warfare in many of its design choices. But it can’t manage any of the fun that Battlefield 2 brought to bear and it lacks Modern Warfare’s fine, self aware polish. In the end there’s very little to recommend it as a game. The only value I can find in it, aside from its brevity, is as a post-modern argument against war. After all, if war is anything like the Medal of Honor reboot it is good that it should be so terrible, lest we grow fond of it.