jerryku's Full Review: Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault for Windows
"Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault" is an average game at best, and not recommended for fans of Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (the game that started it all) or Call of Duty. Those two games were homages to various Spielberg works such as Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers. They really tried to put you into an entertaining recreation of those high quality works. MOHPA is more like a Michael Bay WW2 film (Pearl Harbor), where we have plenty of plucky characters (who act like some stereotypical Hollywood action star, instead of a battle-hardened soldier), tons of explosions, copious amounts of cursing and battle yelping, and weak character dialogue. It's more like a GI Joe cartoon, or comic book, than the more serious attempts of the Call of Duty series.
For example, in the Pearl Harbor levels of MOHPA, you're attacked by squadrons of Japanese aircraft. All of them are specifically targetting you for strafing attacks. After the first few strafes, it was ok. But after the umpteenth plane strafes at me.. it just looks absurd. Then you hop behind some guns and can easily shoot down, not a typo here, 70 (SEVENTY!) aircraft singlehandedly. There are hundreds and hundreds of Japanese planes flying around, all easily blown apart with a few shots. This all illustrates how the whole game is very arcade-like in its approach to the genre and subject matter. I found this even more frustrating to think about as I was saving wounded sailors aboard a sinking battleship. You're supposed to be in this tragic moment of history.. but the whole event, the whole war in fact, is turned into a shoot'em up farce by this game.
There's just not that much to like in MOHPA. The music shines. That's about it. The AI is weak, nothing really better than what we've seen before. The fact that none of your squad mates ever die constantly screams "You are playing a game!" to you. It really takes you out of the game when you see your teammates get shot, stabbed, and blown up.. and just react by moaning a few times, getting patched up by the invulnerable medic, and then get right back into the fight. This was done to let the player have some sort of bond with his squadmates, but it doesn't work at all since none of the characters are remotely interesting. The weapon choice is very limited. The US side grants the player the Carbine, Thompson, shotgun, BAR, Garand, and Springfield sniper rifle. However, you rarely have a wide selection of weapons to choose from. I loved using the Carbine (as most of the rifles are bolt action, the Garand only makes an appearance for about 5% of the game). But, the Carbine is rarely available for use. Instead, you're usually stuck using a highly inaccurate SMG or a horribly slow bolt-action rifle. This becomes increasingly frustrating, as you're so often forced to use just a couple weapon types.
90% of the game is full of very narrow maps, narrow areas. You rarely have any way to truly flank an enemy. Instead, be prepared to be walking down a single 15-yard-wide curving road for the bulk of the game. Jungle foliage everywhere (all done much better in the crappy Vietcong game), rocks to take cover behind. Enemies directly ahead of you, always. It becomes pretty repetitive. The final 10% of the game, however, is quite entertaining. Nice scenery and more open areas there, plus plenty of fun scripted moments. But the bulk of the game seems to indicate some sort of X-box mentality, small areas for the less powerful console systems.
One level has you flying/gunnering a Dauntless attack plane. Nothing special here. The whole ordeal is very thrown together, and arcade-like. It's very forgettable.
The game's graphics didn't strike me as especially good at the medium settings. I suppose they can be pretty nice at max settings, but be sure you have a VERY powerful system in order to run it then. An average system will have to lower graphic settings considerably, which will result in a game that looks worse than Call of Duty. Ugh.
The Director's Cut features are pretty lame. The "director's commentary" that can pop up during the gameplay is just random trivia about the game and the war. The info presented rarely has anything really to do with the actual situations you're in.
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