Medal of Honor: Warfighter
If you’ve been reading up on Medal of Honor: Warfighter, you probably noticed that the reviews are ranging from mediocre to plain bad. But is the game really as bad as the first batch of reviews and scores tend to suggest?
Well, everything you’ve read about the singleplayer experience is correct. The story is hardly compelling and the action is boring. Danger Close and EA have been marketing Warfighter as an experience that’s based on real events and should as such immerse you into the horror of war, but the game doesn’t even come close.
We start with Preacher, a Tier One Operator, supposedly having moral issues and thinking about quitting his job to grow back the bonds with his wife and kid who he’s neglected for so long. Unfortunately, this part is on the verge of being depressing and doesn’t immerse you one bit. The reason for that being that after the cut-scenes, you get flashbacks in which you happily start following a laid out path where you kill one baddie after the other without giving a blink. The game’s story doesn’t compell nor is it interesting. Many reviewers also crucify Warfighter as applauding violence and killing without a shred of remorse while supposedly aiming for realism. We just think of it as a game and found it to have a boring storyline that fails to keep you wanting to reach the next level.
A game can have a meaningless story (even if that wasn’t what the makers were aiming for) and still be fun in the action sequences. Unfortunately, Danger Close fails in this section as well. You follow tightly laid out paths, have zero freedom, hostiles pop up in the same places over and over again, and you can’t even open up a door yourself. “Huh?” I hear you think. The simple act of opening a door is a great example of how Warfighter misses the ball entirely. Each time you reach a closed door, you get next to it, select how to break it down, then another operative takes the action you select, and a very short CG-move puts you in place to shoot down hostiles in slow-motion. The first time you get such a sequence it’s pretty cinematic, but after two or three times going through the same moves it’s tedious and unnecessarily complicated.
Medal of Honor tries to break the repetition by including some specific parts like a sniper sequence or a car chase, but these only point out just how fixed things are. The sniper sequence constantly has the hostiles making the same moves, and the car chase always follows the same routes and ends exactly the same way. We don’t mind on-rails shooting if it serves a purpose (grand finale, cinematic experience) but at the very least it shouldn’t be blatantly obvious and the reward of finishing such a sequence should be gratifying. Which in Warfighter isn’t the case.
Singleplayer sucks, but how does multiplayer work out? Well, actually a lot better.
You can see Warfighter as a combination of Battlefield 3 with Call of Duty. Some would say it lacks the strengths of either series (large maps and vehicles from BF, the perks from CoD) but for a few quick matches it’s perfect. The available modes won’t astonish you with their originality, but the maps just big enough to keep you wandering around and position yourself without being shot instantly and there’s a higher level of realism than in Call of Duty. Also teamplay is rewarded as the buddy system allows you to resupply and heal your fireteam partner, and if you avenge his death he’ll immediately respawn. This allows you to create a bond with any stranger you’re teamed up with and is perfect if you don’t have any friends online and want to quickly play a few maps.
To keep you coming back, there’s of course tons of unlocks and possibilities to improve your character. Next to that, you also have the possibility to join your nation on battlelog and spend the points you earn to improve your nation’s ranking on battlelog. And if you play each day, your points get multiplied as well so doing this on a daily basis increases your country’s ranking exponentially.
Medal of Honor: Warfighter contains quite some bugs (although lately we’ve been experiencing less and less) and has quite the crappy singleplayer. Danger Close and EA never manage to deliver the realism they promise (or if they claim they do, we now know that realism is boring as hell) but fortunately the multiplayer does make up some of the flaws. Our suggestion would be that if you’re fed up with Battlefield and want to have some easy fun online, Warfighter is fun to check out in multiplayer. However, if you want to get a total experience, this Medal of Honor isn’t worth your money.
6.0
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