Don't be scared by the wall of text, it won't eat you.
I like to review things, try to help people understand what, or what not to invest their time in. I don't dabble with a point based rating system. I either recommend things, or don't. Looking for critiques on my writing, if you have anything helpful to add please reply.
While in ventrilo the other day a friend of mine said "
I can download Medal of Honor Beta? But I didn't pre-order it." Neither had I, but lo', amongst my library of games were the words "Medal of Honor Beta". After having installed the game and wasted some of my precious time playing it, here is my impression.
Let me begin by saying that this game has no artistic direction whatsoever. Imagine the movie "Black Hawk Down." Do you have that image in your head? Good, now take all the colors, turn them white, gray, and brown, and saturate the picture, and you have this game. It appears they even stole the music directly from the movie. They even took the loading screen background from the map "Crashed" in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (COD4). And don't get me started on the User Interface.
You load the game to developer logos. Nothing special, but I was jarred when the UI loaded and I couldn't figure it out. (I'll stop right here and warn you that the next paragraph is focused on the interface, which is tedious and unintuitive to use, like wading through a sea of bricks.) There were no "buttons" to be seen and no obvious direction. The game wanted me to log into my EA account, and I suppose these boxes are some stand in for real buttons because there were none to be had. After logging in I was brought to the menu. The list of options is common to what you'd see in any other shooter, but unlike in any other shooter you have to wade through contextual menus to get anything you want. So unlike in other shooters (like COD4), where you click "Join Game" and you wind up at the server browser, in MOH you must log in twice (just to get to the menu) then click play, followed by how you join a game (in this case "matchmake") followed by which game type, and find match. More time in the menus = less time in game. Wait a second, I thought using matchamking was supposed to make it EASIER for people to join games! If you have to navigate through so many contextual menus, why not just make server browsing your primary mode of gaming... It doesn't take nearly as long. At last! you've joined a game, lets get to the action... that is after you've been visually assaulted with a cluttered class selection screen.
In other games that have class selection (Team Fortress 2, Battlefield, etc) you're given VITAL INFORMATION about the different classes. In Team Fortress 2 you can tell just by looking at the pictures what their specialties are. (i.e
Pyro wears a chemical suit and holds a flamethrower,
Heavy is a hulking Russian with an enormous Gatling gun, and the
Spy is wearing a mask and a pinstripey suit.) Even if you haven't played the game before you can already guess what each class does. In MOH the only reason you know they're different classes is because they tell you're they're different. The class selection screen sure doesn't help differentiate between the classes, it shows you a map with no information but lots of moving peaces with no key to tell you what each graphic means, a weapon selection screen and a "Deploy in Base" box. This is my favorite, why do they give you the option to "Deploy in Base" if you can't spawn anywhere else? Why not just use the word "
Ready" or "
Respawn"? It is concise, and doesn't give the illusion of choice when in reality there is none.
Ah, FINALLY to the game play. You've waded through the menu's, you've waited through the loading screen, and you've selected your class and "Deployed in Base", now for some action!Or not. See, the point of a video game is to have fun, and years of game development have proven what parts of game play work and parts that don't. Things like level design, weapon balancing, spawn points, these are things that GOOD developers pay attention to. Though, it would seem DICE has left all these lessons learned in their other pants. Running through the game you can't help but wonder "did anyone design these levels or did they just hit a random map generator button" because there is no flow in this game. There are no contention points, no major thoroughfares, there aren't even any "bases" as they seem to move to wherever your team is. The weapons don't even operate properly, or it would seem that these soldiers live in a universe with no equal or opposite reactions because there is no recoil on any of the weapons. The weapons all sounds like someone with washer and bolt banging against a cardboard box in a makeshift sound studio, and reused sounds from Battlefield BC 2. Another point, why don't they ever charge their weapons?
Here's a little aside about a pet peeve of mine. In most shooters, when you reload you charge the weapon regardless of how many rounds you've fired, when in reality you don't have to charge if there's a round already in the chamber. Well in this game you don't ever have to charge the weapon, they just magically have rounds in them when you insert the magazine. Way to pay attention there game developer guy.
All that to say, I have never felt my time had been more efficiently
wasted than by playing this game. My recommendation? I'm going to have to wait and see how the actual game will play, but the beta is so embarrassing that I may not even buy the game. I've played a few beta's over my time, 2 of the most recent being Starcraft 2 beta and Battlefield Bad Company 2. Both of those games were playable and enjoyable even at that early stage of development. So far this has just been a waste of time.
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Taking permanent impressions off of them is monumentally stupid.
we should all know by now that betas these days are nothing more than selective demos.
and I thought the demo was alright I guess. don't think I would end up playing it over TF2 or Bad Company 2 or anything else 2.
there just didn't seem to be that much variety in weapons and classes and everything felt like I had done it before elsewhere. fact that its going to be selling at the 60 dollar pricemark for the PC version on steam doesn't help its case any. but I mean I guess it was fun shooting guys but I already shoot guys in every other game I have
It'll help, along with GTAIV and RF:G that I just finally picked up, and Alien Swarm, to bridge the gap between the SC2 beta and SC2, but......... yeah I don't think I'll buy MoH unless it's super cheap at some point.
I'm not going to talk about the UI stuff since you pretty much covered it. Suffice to say I don't like it too much either.
One additional thing though. When you get killed you are stuck on, what's essentially, a loadscreen with a sound loop. Very annoying. Of course I was getting killed a lot so the soundloop made the game sound like a broken record. At least in CoD or BC2 you get a view of who killed you. But no, in MoH they have to remove you from the game every time you die.
My biggest concern is with the gameplay. It's really quite bad. No recoil. Almost no way of telling where your bullets are hitting. Remember those big sparks you get when shooting a wall in CoD4/MW2? Those are very usefull in telling you where your hits are. There's also no hitsound, which I liked so much in CoD4/MW2. We've been spoiled by superbly crafted shooters these past couple of years but this game is holding back so much information, it almost feels like you're playing underwater.
All weapons feel and sound the same. The flow of simply running and gunning feels completely broken. Running seems painfully slow, aiming down the sight feels unresponsive. Pushing shift to run (not like CoD where you do "a run" or BC2 where you can run without pushing forward). There's no need to handle your rifle. Forget about burst firing because you're shooting lasers!
Hold down the trigger untill you get that really bad looking skidmark of a popup informing you've scored some points.
I wasn't expecting this from DICE, since the gameplay in their games has been quite good.
My guess is that they are limited by the development time and budget and, maybe more important, the single player campaign. I can imagine they got the gun mechanics, animations and assets from SP, and are stuck with them.
I think that if DICE would have it's way, this game would be so much better. But the quality of their game would far outshine what EA LA is doing. The difference would be too big, and "ideally" MP and SP have to be on par. Though both will be subpar compared to CoD or BF.
It's as if they haven't heard of the invention of the mouse pointer device thingamabob yet.
Things that look like they should be clickable aren't. Want to switch game mode when searching for a quick game? You don't click the big button-looking game mode thingies. No, you click on the arrows on each side of the list instead.
This sounds like it makes sense, but I have yet to find a beta that was god-awful but the final game was amazing-perfect. Likewise, I've never been in an awesome beta and the finalized product was a shitstorm. The beta is a pretty good indication of how a final game is going to feel and play. I'm sorry. We've seen it time and again.
So I don't buy that argument as much anymore.
I would play so much more BC2 if the game didn't see fit to kick me so often.
When I was logging in and putting in the key, I would hit tab and nothing would happen. I would hit enter after typing and nothing would happen.
It's like they just took a 360 UI and said "Eh.... probably fine for PC too"
Despite wading through port forwarding and uninstalling and reinstalling punkbuster, and updating BC2 and jumping through a million hoops, I recently moved and now punkbuster hates me, and kicks me 20 seconds into every match I try to join. Therefore I cannot play
The game is less than 3 months away. Contrary to popular belief, you can't do a whole lot in 3 months. I don't doubt that the game will be "better" at launch, but at this point I'd say that what people are playing is fairly indicative of the final product.
My fear is that the already relatively small community that plays BC2 (compared to say MW2 or TF2) is going to be further splintered by a game that I don't think is as good.
(I still don't know how DICE managed to fuck the UI up since they did a pretty bang up job on BF:BC2, but I'm jaded enough to not even be surprised anymore. This shit sounds par for the course with PC games nowadays, and people wonder and complain about PC gamers talk about games being "consolized." beta, beta, whatever)
The new MoH seems like a game born out of EA's desperate desire to try to replicate the Call of Duty phenomenon. They want it so, so bad, and it just seems a bit sad. Single player might be fun though, no idea.
Two things irked me about the beta.
First, the design aesthetic is positively schizo-fucking-phrenic. Okay, so you're going for a more realistic game setting than the Michael Baysplosions of either MW2 or BC2? Works for me. But if I'm going to play a more realistic Taliban shooting at more realistic Coalition forces in more realistic Iraqi landmarks, it's a wee bit jarring to have an 80's arcade game style glowing "+23 POINTS!" pop up when I manage to actually kill someone. That shit was irksome in MW2 and it's even less coherent here.
Second, the gameplay lacks the chaotic goofiness of the Battlefield games and the tension of more realistic shooters. So I get sniped in the brainpan from a mile and a half away (with no kill-cam? Really?), but respawn 2 seconds later, over and over and over again.
I don't doubt that they can address many of the issues, especially UI related in 3 months. But the base game, once you get past the horrible UI, needs a lot of work too. "Level design, weapon balancing, spawn points, recoil, respawning, weapon loading" as the others have said, ALL of these things need work in addition to a UI that is barely functional at best. The game hits store selves on October 12th. When you take into account that the game needs to go gold and start production some time before that you realize that DICE has probably less than 2 months to work on this game.
People should just stick to BC2. Get in the Dome!
But hearing about shit like a beard-based leveling system is not encouraging at all. So what, you don't go prestige, instead you shave and turn your baseball cap around the right way?
Does anyone have a spare beta key they could pm me?
"Comrades, this is the proudest day you have ever lived. You will fight the Nazi invaders with all your strength..."
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
Also if you couldn't figure out the UI then I don't know what to tell you. Finally, the classes are Soldier with an AR, Sniper with a DMR, and Spec Ops with a SMG, what more description do you need?
The gameplay is still pretty not great though.
Like was said earlier, the points system was really, REALLY, annoying. I prefer BC2 because I can ignore it and focus on the shooting, having 6 square inches taken up by my score is a real pain in the ass. I didn't see any intro because my computer stopped to ask if I really wanted it to connect to the internet. I figured I would open it again to see the movies but after I quite, I uninstalled it. Someone message me when they have an update.
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
Is that in the mission with a team sort of game mode? Because in the team Deathmatch mode there is only deploy at base. And there's not really any clear indication of what or where that is,
What's the difference between the AR and SMG? What will the classes later get down the line?
That information isn't shared unless you jump through another 10 menus. The only one of those that gives you information about the class is the Sniper.
There's not even any information about the grenade launcher or the RPG in the spawning choice, other than the fact that the Spec Ops is carrying an RPG in the picture. If there's no further info on the classes other than "Soldier, Spec Ops, Sniper", then they might as well be "Googly, Moogly, Sniper" for all it tells the player.
Frustrating Arcadey-Sim Mishmash with gunplay that looks, sounds, and feels like shit is hard to "tweak" away.
The UI has been covered enough to not warrant dead-horsing, but suffice it to say it is an equal crime against nature.
stable does not a good game make.
I'm interested, why is this terrible according to some of you? It's certainly derivative, but far from awful.
EDIT: On further playing, Team Assault does indeed suck, but the other mode is quite playable.
It's worth mentioning that this has always been a strange as hell decision.
Edit spoiler : I find this relevant-
It was a strange decision. If they were going with different developers, they probably should have still gone with the same engine so all of the assets could be easily used in both.
That should be 'The state of shooters', since every other genre tends to have quite a bit of diversity.
I checked as I played today, and it definitely only tells you Spec Ops carries rockets if you are on the Insurgency, and that's because it's named "Insurgent RPG trooper" or something, down at the bottom left. If you're US it just says "US Army Ranger" Nowhere else does it say there's a rocket. At least, not when you're spawning or picking the loadout.
Unless it's somewhere and I'm missing it, I'm just not seeing it
That's from a Cracked.com article talking about E3. I'm pretty sure he might cover other things that aren't FPSes in it. But who knows! Don't take so much umbrage at a picture on the internet.
Guess I know what I'll be playing for a bit.
Back to BC2.