Okay, so really I could include the entire franchise as among my favourite games of all time, as I have loved every release in the history of Medal of Honor. But, this is about a top ten, so I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the original game.
It is hard to imagine a time when World War II games were not everywhere, on every platform. But as it says right there on the back of the box, Medal of Honor, in 1999, was ‘the only game that lets you fight Nazis in World War II’.
In Medal of Honor you are James Patterson, a special forces operative tasked with taking down the Nazi war machine by going deep behind enemy lines with nothing but a machine gun and some explosives.
This was not the cartoony fun of mowing down hordes of brown-shirt goons with a minigun, ala Wolfenstein. This was gritty realism. The missions were based on real events, like the sabotage of the Ryukan Hydro-electric plant in Norway to stop the Nazi development of nuclear weapons, and the scuttling of a U-Boat as it sat ready and armed in its heavily-guarded pen.
The series’ tendency toward basing individual missions, as well as overall campaigns, on actual historical events, began here.
So what made it a great game? Well, pretty much everything. Firstly, the level design. This is absolutely a corridor shooter (sometimes you are literally in corridors) but the levels that took place outdoors did not feel like corridors. Battling through hedgerows and bombed out buildings to locate a downed pilot’s logbook, or the awesome level where you are stalking toward the hydro-electric plant through snowy mountain passes, felt open and alive. This was as close to open-level design as the technology at the time would allow.
This open ‘feel’ was in large part due to the excellent sound design. This was DreamWorks, after all (this game came out not even a year after Saving Private Ryan). There is the magnificently ‘weighty’ feel of the M1 Garand banging away, the chatter of the German machine pistols, the thunderous roar of the mounted machine guns. But it was the ambient sound that elevated this game above other shooters at the time, like GoldenEye (which was a great game for sure). Here, the distant sound of artillery and distant pop-pop of small arms fire would ring out constantly, so as you played through the missions, you were always aware that something else was going on, somewhere else. This is something the entire series nailed from the get-go: the feeling that your role was only a small cog in a giant war machine.
The enemy AI was too, as good as it got in 1999. If they spotted you, they would drop and roll. If you surprised them, they would actively seek cover. They would continue to fire even when wounded, something that has become a staple of shooter AI mechanics.
And of course, Medal of Honor established the formula of the series, and something other shooters copied: the whole ‘find a location, attach a bomb’, or the ‘capture a machine gun nest and then defend against waves of scripted enemies’ – things that became overused as time went on. But there was genuine tension here. The feeling that something was at stake. The feeling that this was not ‘just a game’.
Medal of Honor is among my favourite games because this was the first game ever where I reached the end, and then turned around and started a new game right away. It was the first game I found myself still playing into the small hours, bleary-eyed and chanting ‘just one more mission’. And it was the game that cemented my status as a fan of the series. I have played, and loved, every single game in the Medal of Honor franchise. I am the only person I know who thought Warfighter was a great game (it was). And Allied Assault, which really did have open level design, and pushed the boundaries of PS2 technology to near breaking point so often you could actually hear the console straining. Not to mention the direct sequel to this one, Medal of Honor: Underground, which refined the mechanics, improved the sound even further, and to my knowledge is still the only first-person shooter to feature a female protagonist.
I could go on, but I’ll just say this: it’s one of the great shames of my gaming life that this series came to an end, but I am glad I held on to my old PS2 so I can still wheel these games out from time to time and remind myself that Medal of Honor did World War II first, and did it better, than anything that came after.
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