Medal of Honor: Airborne Review

Still, as these things go, all this innovation in Airborne comes at a certain price.

Ze Germans are natural acrobats.

Incredible looking 3D landscape.

Ironically, the part where Airborne goes wrong has a lot to do with all the things that Airborne does right.

The quality of the AI simply isn't good enough to keep up with the map configuration. While, often, Nazi soldiers will exhibit rather believable movement patterns, on a good number of occasions, they'll simply seem lost - running around in loops or just aiming and shooting at nothing, being stuck in the same movement pattern until you put them out of their misery. I suspect this has to do with the fact that there are so many ways in which you can surprise them in this game. The situation gets especially bad as we get into close-quarters combat. For some odd reason, the Nazis insist on following the same movement patterns we'd see them executing outdoors, often inexplicably taking cover even though they can clearly take the shot and take you out.

Overall, however, I would say that the AI is tolerable, as I never felt the intensity of the action would let up solely on account of enemy intelligence (or lack of thereof rather).

Next to the AI blunders, the collision detection (bounding box issues?) on the enemy models is not the most precise I've seen. Even though you'll land a crippling shot to the elbow or the knee, the game simply won't detect it.

In one very isolated incident, the enemy soldier even went through the wall and shot at me. I shot back and killed him. He was kneeling through his guardhouse wall with nothing but thin air to support his weight. Granted, this was ONE isolated event, not an epidemic.

Finally, even though Airborne offers multiplayer support, I'm certain many gamers will be disappointed with the amount of content in the single-player game. You won't necessarily finish this in under six hours of playing (namely because of its difficulty and the checkpoint save system), but at the end of the day, one would expect to see more missions and more locales in a full-featured triple-A release.

Nonetheless, despite some of its shortcomings, I still recommend MoH: Airborne to shooter fans. With a couple of patches that tweak the AI and collision detection, one should overlook the lack of more single-player content as the gameplay experience you'll get is rewarding enough to warrant a purchase.

Performance-wise, the game ran beautifully on my Intel Core Duo/2GB RAM/8800 GTS rig, at 1600x1200 and with all the details set to high. Not only did it run beautifully, it looked beautiful to boot, with excellent use of HDR lighting and with amazing-looking, sprawling urban 3D landscapes. Also, don't forget that a single-player demo has been released by EA, which should help you out in making your final decision.