|
EALA’s latest title is quite good. The Medal of Honor series has always been about Hollywood-style cinematics, a feeling of grandness that is able to portray what war is all about: the cooperation of many united towards a similar objective. Medal of Honor Pacific Assault continues this tradition with a great single-player campaign and an above-average multiplayer component.
Pacific Assault’s single player mode is where the game really shines. It is quite long and takes you through a number of locations and heavy-duty action runs as Tommy Conlin, marine, and his squad. You’ll go through these tropical settings, fully expecting enemies to come at you from all angles, and when they do they come in huge numbers, so much so that they frequently outnumber you. Nonetheless, you can count on the game to keep you on your toes right through the end.
In keeping with the realism, you simply can’t find medkits and rejuvenate your virtual character. You’ll need to keep a corpsman close for him to get you back to health. Other times, he has to help out your squad members, so it is wise to help them out as best as possible. That said, the squad members are rather intelligent and do a good job of helping themselves. As with any AI character, sometimes they don’t help you as well as they could have, but thankfully these times are rare.
The game encourages numerous runs by including many difficulty levels, which truly do their job by making the game even more realistic, going as far as removing the heads-up-display. Along the way, you’ll also find some optional objectives which when completed reward you with medals.
The game’s multiplayer is well-designed even though it clearly wasn’t the focus for the development team. Finding a game is a breeze, and lag varies with the server but for the most part, the online experience is smooth. The maps included are varied enough and some of the larger ones do fit up to 32 players for extremely chaotic (in a good way) action. There are three game modes included the standard deathmatch and its team counterpart, but also invader. This mode places two teams in a map and gives them a number of (relatively simple) objectives which then have to be completed. The radar system does a good ob of keeping it all in order.
The game’s visuals do an excellent job of bringing the historical matter to life in an intriguing way. The character and weapon models are excellent, and include top-notch animation and great detail. The environments are very realistic, and you’ll really feel like you’re traversing whatever location the game throws you in. The engine is very demanding and causes frame-rates to stutter at higher resolutions, and load times are a bit on the long side.
The game’s audio is predominantly well-designed. The game’s fitting, dramatic and beautifully-orchestrated soundtrack does an excellent job of aurally portraying the game’s visuals. Sound effects are loud and clear and precisely represent the action, as equally well as the soundtrack. The dialogue is quite convincing as well, although some of the chatter is a bit repetitive.
Overall, Medal of Honor Pacific Assault does a great job of balancing the historical content, while providing a fun to game to play. The game’s cinematic, immersive qualities are no longer unique to series and do not play as large of an unique role as they did when the series first launched, but Medal of Honor Pacific Assault does so particularly well. It is an engaging experience from the beginning through its conclusion, and the many difficulty levels and online support really bring up its replay value. -- Adam Nunez, PGNx Media
---- Nov 15, 2004
|
