Thanks to the generosity of a random person on Twitter, I obtained a beta key for the latest Medal of Honor game that is set to come out in a few months so I thought I'd give you guys my first impressions. Now keep in mind that I've only had about an hour or so with the game so I haven't gotten to experience everything there is to offer yet, and plus it's a beta so not everything is there and polished.
The beta is multiplayer only and contains 2 different game modes that you can play, one is team deathmatch and the other is sort of an attack and defend type game, similar to "war" from Call of Duty: World at War and CoD3, I'll get into the game modes more in a minute. The game starts off and you can go through and edit your guns. You only have a choice of 3 different load outs to start, a rifleman, a specialist and a sniper and each of these classes only has 1 gun available at the beginning as far as I could tell. You have to level up in order to unlock new guns and attachments, similar to MW2. So once I figured out the menu system and turned up my sensitivity, it was time to play.
I jumped right into a quick match which dumped me in the "war" type game (I can't remember what it's called at the moment). It's still a team based game, but one team is trying to defend certain areas while the other team is trying to take them over. The offensive team must take over one area before they can move onto the next as they slowly make their way from one end of the map to the other. I actually thought this game mode was pretty fun, but I did have one big problem with it that could kill the whole game for me... the respawning. It got to a point where someone on the other team got right behind our spawn and just sat there. As we respawned in the same spot over and over again this guy would just kill us instantly. I know when you get to certain spots on the map you can choose to respawn in your base or on the frontlines, but each spawn seemed to only have one set location rather than randomizing it a bit, so even when the teams switched and I was on the other team I got trapped in spawn camper hell. For me to really enjoy and play this game they are going to have to rethink the respawns and figure out a way to curb the spawn campers. On a positive note I didn't seem to have the same problem when playing a team deathmatch game though.
Aside from the game modes, lets talk about gameplay. The multiplayer aspect of Medal of Honor is being developed by Dice, the same guys that brought you Battlefield Bad Company 2 and if you've read my review of Bad Company 2 you already know where this is heading... kind of. Coming off of Modern Warfare 2, I was not a fan of Bad Company 2's multiplayer so going into Medal of Honor I was pretty worried. When I first started playing I was very annoyed with it because it wasn't Modern Warfare 2, but once I convinced myself that it wasn't, I was able to get into it a bit more. I like the scale of things in MoH much better than Bad Company 2 so that was a nice change, but the control aspect that I hated the most in Bad Company 2 is very much alive in MoH... you can't strafe when you're running. I think this is just something I've got to get over because the more I think about it the more it seems realistic that you wouldn't be able to strafe while running full speed ahead, but it doesn't help that I've been used to it for years now in the CoD series. So strafing aside I think I could grow to like this one, but I hope the single player is really good because I could still see myself going back to CoD when Black Ops comes out, but I will probably pick up Medal of Honor in the meantime.
I'll play a lot more this weekend and see if my perspective on the game changes, but I think I got the gist of it after a few sessions last night.
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