This game was my introduction to online multiplayer First Person Shooters, released in 2002 by EA Games and developed by 2015, Inc. The third game in the Medal of Honor series set in World War II from the point of view from the Allies. A colleague of my father introduced him to it and invited him to eventually join a clan and once I honed my skills I also joined. The world of online multiplayer was a scary one, my only experience of multiplayer was split-screen on consoles with friends around my house or theirs. This was huge, I could play with anyone from around the world and with third party party software I could also talk to them, it expanded my world of gaming for the better. The single player campaign was what you would expect from World War II FPS and I will talk about it, however, focusing more on the multiplayer aspect as it was a defining aspect which transformed my gaming experience.
The single player campaign was an interesting one, especially for history buffs, you get to relive the Second World War from the eyes of U.S Army Ranger Lt. Mike Powell. All key battles such as Omaha Beach and the Invasion of Africa, you do get a relative understanding of the battles, not to the same extent of actually being there, but you get an idea of what happened. The way the campaign worked was that you are given a series of objectives on every mission, normally to secure a location, destroy enemy equipment or escort armor. You get to use the weapons of the war including their limitations, weapons such as the Enfield, Thompson and Springfield Sniper rifle. Overall a very enjoyable experience and is only made better by its following expansion packs Spearhead and Breakthrough adding missions and extra content for multiplayer.
Multiplayer is what you would expect from any FPS, you choose from either the Allies or the Axis and allowed to pick from their specific weapons such as MP.40 and the BAR including many others. You can pick from numerous different modes such as Deathmatch, Objective and Round Based, these were eventually supplemented by fans and “modders” with new maps and modes. I spent countless hours trying to hone my multiplayer skills to prove my worth to the clan and eventually took part in tournaments with my [BW-UK] clan tags.
Day of the Tiger Mission
Most of the missions you do in the single player campaign are recreated as multiplayer maps and you can compete among your friends to see who the better player is. Above is an example of a map which was recreated as the multiplayer map “The Bridge” one of my favorite maps with the objective to blow the bridge up or protect it, numerous sniper nests made this map very tactical and on occasion a nightmare if you were having a bad game.
The graphics are impressive for the year the game was release, I remember thinking this was so life like and as most PC games you could “amp” up the graphics depending on how powerful your machine was making the game even more lifelike. You could pretty much modify it to look however gruesome or unrealistic you wanted. I remember my clan had a server and they added a blood mod and balanced weapon damage to reflect how it would be like to actually be shot by a weapon from World War II. They called it the realism mod, this transition was rather terrifying, you went from having to empty a whole clip into an enemy to one hit kills your tactics really had to change. That was the beauty of online multiplayer you could continuously modify anything and you would get a different experience from all kinds of servers.
In conclusion, this game really defined my whole gaming experience and opened a whole different world of gaming to me so I must put this in one of my top 10 games of all time. The years spent playing this game trying to become one of the best players of Medal of Honor Allied Assault really signifies how defining this game was for Online FPS considering Counter-Strike was leading the way in competitive first person shooters. I will give this game a solid 8/10 for the gripping yet somewhat historically accurate single player campaign and the ever evolving online multiplayer. Lasting to 2014 when GameSpy announced the shutdown of their master servers. Impressive.
Hope you guys enjoyed the read!
Dec
Gaming Reviews 