What We’d Like To See In Medal of Honor: Warfighter

Medal of Honor has been around since 1999 if you can believe it.  A WWII franchise that put first-person shooters on the console radar in the days of the PS2 has moved on to a modern setting like most war games nowadays.  2010′s reboot of the MoH franchise covered the Afghan war and the fight against the Taliban.  What was hyped to be a perfect mix of Battlefield and Call of Duty turned out to be a disappointment for the hardcore FPS fan.  EA did manage to sell quite a few copies, though, over 5 million to be exact.  This warrants a sequel of course, so EA has been teasing the last half of year that MoH2 was inbound. Slated for release this year; we’ll most likely start hearing about it in the coming months with what I think will be a November release, to steal numbers from the next Call of Duty.  I can only hope that EA’s Danger Close studio doesn’t disappoint as their portion of the game was the best of the package, even though that isn’t saying too much.  DICE was in charge of multiplayer and it was less than stellar so what does the sequel need to be the next best thing? Here’s what we think:

1. ‘Fighting for your life’

What I enjoyed most about my $20 purchase was the single player campaign of Medal of Honor.  I felt a connection to the silent but deadly, badass, beard-wielding special forces of AFO Neptune and Wolfpack.  When one of the pack went down, it was a big deal and the game communicated that pretty well.  A point in the game where an entire Afghan valley opens up on you and your squad, leaving you to fight for your life until help arrives, really got me thinking that my character was a goner.  Music started playing, sort of like the music of a valiant charge in a war movie before a major character dies.  I won’t spoil the moment, but burning through all that ammo, dodging explosions and RPG’s got the blood rushing and what was happening carried a lot of weight despite this being a video game.

2. “Tear up that script!”

One of my main issues playing through the campaign were scripted moments.  I can’t tell you how many times a fellow NPC wouldn’t move forward unless I was standing on an invisible ‘X’.  There’s scripted moments in any FPS but it was unforgiving here, leading you to believe you missed an objective, running all the way back to the beginning to find that its the game’s fault.  When you finally got your buddies to move up, they either took their sweet time catching up to you with no enemies around or would hang up when they needed to open a door for you to progress.  There was another particularly frustrating moment where I had the drop on enemy Taliban, lit them up and one remained like he was invincible.  Moving up a little, this guy was suppose to alert the rest of the mountain, so he couldn’t die? I tried this several times but I guess that mission just couldn’t be stealthy!

3. “Don’t roll any more DICE”

“Here are your two guns, but here are a couple attachments for those”

DICE ended up being the worst part of this game, there, I said it.  When I first said that an EA studio was going to handle campaign and DICE handle multiplayer, I couldn’t wait to see what they’d come up with.  Coming off of Bad Company 2, DICE had a pretty damn good console multiplayer record but something went wrong here.  Not sure if they started work on Battlefield 3 already or if they just wanted to make a bad cameo.  Whatever the reason, let one developer handle it all next time so it doesn’t seem half-assed.

4. ‘American Muscle’

This village is about to burst into a pile of rubble

There were a lot of cool vehicle/turret sequences that ended up being a lot of fun.  Even the ATV sequence, as seen in a picture above, was fun even though that mission was a bit of a pain to complete.  My favorite sequence has to be the Apache sequence at the end of the game, though.  You tore through that Afghan valley like a knife through butter and made those Taliban wish they were never born thanks to some American muscle.

Let us know what YOU want to see in the next Medal of Honor in the comments below!