Medal of Honor: EA’s Lucky Rabbit’s Foot

Spoiler warning: Campaign spoilers for Medal of Honor, including end-game material. You’ve been warned.

What a difference a year makes, you might think. Ever since Konami unceremoniously dumped Six Days in Fallujah, a shooter set in a very real, war-torn Iraq, gaming writers and pundits have raised the question of whether video games will ever be ready to tackle difficult subjects, even when those subjects seem to fit neatly into standard gaming contexts, like the chronicle of a military conflict. Of course, a lot of the controversy over Six Days in Fallujah, whichintended to realistically depict the events of the Second Battle of Fallujah, illustrates just how difficult that is in practice. Opposition came from many angles—supporters of the war and the military, worried that the game would trivialize and cheapen the experiences of soldiers still engaged in Iraq, found rare common ground with peace activists who believed neither Konami nor developer Atomic Games could do justice to the complex political issues surrounding the U.S. occupation of Iraq in general and the retaking of Fallujah in particular.

A year and a half after Six Days in Fallujah’s initial unveiling, Medal of Honor appears to do some of what Six Days in Fallujah wanted to do: it’s set in a real-world Afghanistan, mentions the Taliban by name, and puts the player inside the ongoing conflict in the south-central Asian country. It’s been greeted with its fair share of controversy as well; EA removed all mention of the Taliban from the multiplayer modes after criticism that allowing people to play as the Taliban and win was an affront to those still fighting in Afghanistan today. But even the scope of the Medal of Honor controversy and the eventual fix highlights the difference between what Six Days in Fallujah and Medal of Honor aimed to do. The former was occasionally described as a “survival horror” game where the tension and uncertainty of fighting guerilla insurgents amid a sea of civilians in an urban setting replaced the traditional boogeymen of zombies and mutants. The issues it raised were fundamental: what sort of material can video games, as a medium, cover effectively? Is it possible to discuss the pros and cons of the Iraq occupation in the context of a third-person shooter? Is that something we as a society even want, considering how many people still think video games are for kids?

More to the point, none of Six Days in Fallujah’s potential problems could be solved by simply finding and eliminating all instances of the word “Taliban” in the game’s source code.

I picked up Medal of Honor on the cheap during the Direct2Drive EA sale, partially so I could compare the campaign to Call of Duty: Black Ops and see if my earlier predictions were correct. As EA’s newest challenger to the popular Activision shooter, there was essentially no chance that Medal of Honor, despite its real-world setting, would turn into anything remotely resembling a Six Days in Fallujah. Instead, it focuses on a few Tier 1 operators (a term most people hadn’t even heard of until Medal of Honor, if you believe Google results) performing various missions in the hills near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. It’s very similar to Call of Duty in format—scripted sequences interwoven with fierce gun fights, often seen through iron sights, and the occasional stealth or vehicle sequence. Compared to Black Ops, though, Medal of Honor’s narrative is less ambitious and more down-to-earth; instead of interrogation rooms, shadowy conspiracies and frightening secret weapons, you have American military personnel trying to survive in Afghanistan despite bad orders from a pencil-pushing Pentagon jockey.

If Black Ops is a Michael Bay movie, Medal of Honor is a Michael Bay movie with half the budget. This is not necessarily a bad thing, though. Medal of Honor’s ATV ride certainly feels more realistic than Modern Warfare 2’s rollercoaster snowmobile chase, complete with gangsta-pose submachine gun fire. Overall, the tone is a lot more documentary; many of the more cinematic touches you normally see in a Call of Duty game are toned down or eliminated here. As a result, the scripted sequences fit in better, and there are fewer moments where control of your character is wrestled away from you. I didn’t encounter any ridiculous glitches like in Black Ops, though I ran into plenty of doors that wouldn’t open until my fellow squadmates had said their lines of dialogue, or invisible walls I couldn’t pass until I heard the right radio message.

But the emphasis on a more realistic narrative comes at a price: fewer peaks and valleys in the narrative mean a less interesting story overall. And while Medal of Honor admirably dials down the action a tad, it doesn’t really bring anything substantially new to the table. Modern Warfare wasn’t the first to do prolonged sniper sequences, but Medal of Honor is more obviously retreading familiar ground several years later. Black Ops, at least, had a sequence where you commanded a squad through the camera of a reconnaissance drone, and then leapt into the body of a squad member to execute certain actions; Medal of Honor’s most memorable sequence, an army squad desperately trying to hold a crumbling hut against waves of Taliban emerging endlessly from the hills, is not particularly inventive or new.

Medal of Honor’s single-player campaign will suffer in the end for not going to any single extreme. Anyone who loves the Call of Duty and Modern Warfare games will continue playing those; Medal of Honor is, at best, a diverting sideshow on the way to the main event. Anyone who hates the scripted, on-rails nature of the Call of Duty games won’t find Medal of Honor different enough to care. That leaves a slim portion of gamers who like the formula in general, but have qualms with the Hollywood blockbuster route Activision has taken. And even then, it’s not that Medal of Honor doesn’t try to take that route as well; it’s just that its narrative aims are slightly different. In the end, we may wish that EA had decided to turn Medal of Honor into a fully realized Six Days in Fallujah; as it stands now, we just have another decently executed modern-combat first-person shooter.

[This article, sans images, originally appeared on Wesley’s Dear Game Diary tumblr]