I’ve been playing a good chunk of World War II games lately. Mostly Return to Castle Wolfenstein and the RealRTCW mod, where I got to sample the various custom campaigns made for RTCW over the years, which was pretty darn neat. Cursed Sands, a set of prologue missions exclusive to the console versions of Return to Castle Wolfenstein finally got ported to the PC recently, and I got to play those, which was fun.
This sent me down a brief rabbit hole of getting back into old World War II shooter games. This old genre that was once incredibly ubiquitous 25 years ago has been dead now outside of small pocket niches within the genre. Why am I talking about this genre specifically? Well, killing nazis in video games has been a national pastime, and lately it just seems like the best time as any to celebrate.
During my search, I started looking back at the various World War II shooters I own. One of which is arguably a progenitor of the genre: Medal of Honor. I’m gonna look at one of the last entries in the WWII era of Medal of Honor, one that ended up being swept away by Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and the modern military shooter glut we’d start seeing more of throughout the late 2000s.
Medal of Honor: Airborne is one of the last major WWII entries in the series, and the last mainline WWII MOH title on PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. (Wii and PSP owners would get Medal of Honor: Heroes 2 the following year.) Developed by EA Los Angeles and published by Electronic Arts (natch), this came out in September 2007 to above average reception, and would’ve probably held out as a modest success had the Modern Warfare train not started barreling through just a few months later.
My personal experience is finding this for ten bucks on discount at a Best Buy a year or so after it came out, alongside copies of Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando and one other thing I don’t remember. This was just around the time that physical PC games were slowly being phased out of stores, but before Steam became the digital juggernaut it would become, so it was pretty common to find stuff like this on clearance.
You play as Boyd Travers, a soldier of the 82nd Airborne division in World War II. A successful graduate of the Gordon Freeman School of Character Development, Travers is the only soldier who’s actually named, everybody else is a soldier with a gun with no other defining characteristics, which is funny because there’s cutscenes with random soldiers chit-chatting at specific points to break up the monotony, but these soldiers don’t have a name and don’t really matter. I could get they’re trying to make one feel sympathetic for these characters, but that only works if there’s, y’know, actual characters with a profile and backstory to care about.
There’s a lot of changes that Medal of Honor: Airborne attempts to do to spice up the genre, and the most notable is its level structure. Instead of being planted at a start point and taken on a straightforward path, the player is dropped in by airplane with a parachute, giving options on where to land. Each level has green smoke plumes in fixed areas, as definitive “land here if you don’t want to die in five seconds” areas, but the player can land anywhere and everywhere they choose. Hell, the game has skill drops for landing in specific areas, of which give a pair of wings for a successful landing.
Each level has multiple objectives that must be completed to progress. In another break from tradition, these can be done in any order of the player’s choosing. There have been times where games like Call of Duty 2 would have missions where the player can choose the order, but most of the time these were linear shooters with clear point A to point B objectives. I have to give EA Los Angeles credit for at least giving the player an option to tackle the objectives in any order, it’s a nice change of pace and makes replays feel less predictable.
Another system Airborne introduces that no other game in the series would do before or since was the upgrades system. Taking a page from fellow action game franchise Ratchet & Clank, killing enemies with weapons fills a blue outline of the weapon, that when fully filled levels up the weapon and gives the player an upgrade that differs from weapon to weapon: Increased fire rate, more accurate shots, fast reload, simple stuff like that. This isn’t just for primary weapons, every weapon has it, including your M1911 sidearm with infinite ammo, all your grenades, there’s even one mission where one must assemble a recoilless rifle to take out a tank, and that too has upgrades!
The final upgrade, called “Expert Commendation,” changes the upgrade to a more unusual one, like the MP40 getting a melee dagger, to the STG44 getting a scope, to the Thompson going from a standard M1A1 Thompson on the field to a literal Chicago Typewriter by the maximum level. It’s so ridiculous, I love it. Now I know where my friend weasel got inspiration for his weapon upgrade system in the old Doom mod “Police Brutality: wildweasel presents: Terrorists!”, something I wrote about back in 2014 for Doom mods better than Brutal Doom.
I think EA Los Angeles were onto something with this and it’s a shame it never took off much beyond Ratchet & Clank. Later WWII themed games like Wolfenstein (2009) would have upgradeable weapons too, but done in the more conventional shop method. As far as I know, no other shooter in this does this besides Ratchet & Clank.
The game is otherwise fairly bog standard 2007-era shooter fare. There’s a health bar which will regenerate to the nearest bar if taking damage like in Resistance: Fall of Man and similar games in the genre, but there’s also medkits that fill one bar. (Sadly, no canteens like classic Medal of Honor here.) The player can only hold two weapons alongside their sidearm, and grenades are something that must be thrown manually and not automatically, which may throw off those familiar with the Halo/Call of Duty style of grenade combat. There’s generous checkpoints after completing at least one of the objectives, which every time will result in dropping you in rather than just landing, at least until a certain point partway into the level.
With all these neat and interesting ideas, it’s a shame that the gameplay feels weak. Most of my shots on my weapons look like they barely hit enemies, even when fully maxed out. Enemies don’t really flinch or react when hit, and while there are hitmarkers, they aren’t really helpful. There’s so many spots where one can be shot to death through a small crevice of crates and there’s often no good places to take cover. This leads to a problem where the later stages of the game become a frustrating slog, even on Normal difficulty. The level at the railway station has a myriad of snipers everywhere and they were always a pain in the ass to deal with due to the inconsistent combat. I never figured out a sound strategy for these areas beyond slowly picking away at enemies until I didn’t see enemies on screen or in the compass, and then continuing on. Quite annoying to play the game this way.
While I was cursing my head off during the back half of the game due to constant deaths, the game itself was a fairly smooth breeze. It took a few hours, roughly the same amount as most other games in the genre, and one can replay levels to upgrade weapons, getting better star rankings to unlock bonus videos, and all that. There was a multiplayer mode, but EA shut that down years ago, as is tradition. From what I vaguely remember playing it back in the day, it had deathmatch and team multiplayer objective modes, but lacked the weapon upgrade system, everything was already at maximum level.
This would also be the final score Michael Giacchino would do for Medal of Honor as a series, but honestly I don’t think much of a unique score was shown here, as a good chunk of the game music is all recycled from past Medal of Honor games. (At least, the ones Giacchino composed for, there’s no music from Rising Sun or European Assault, as those were done by Christopher Lennertz.) The beginning, once the airplanes swoop in and the logo appears, has the classic Medal of Honor leitmotif playing, but in a minor key, which makes it sound unintentionally melancholic. Almost like a swan song.
When I initially played Medal of Honor: Airborne back in the day, I was kinda annoyed at some of the later things the game does. After destroying enemy train cars and tanks at a railyard, we encounter one more train which introduces a Supersoldier that takes a lot of damage and wields an MG42 like it’s a minigun. After that level, where most of the previous levels were based on events during various WWII Operations, the final level is on a giant tall Flak Tower smack dab in the middle of Germany.
When I played through the game back in the day, I used to complain about these two things, saying that it’s not historically accurate and makes it feel like a bad Wolfenstein game. At the time, I felt it was a stain on a franchise that already was looking old and dated compared to its brethren. Now when I think about it, younger me was kind of a dunce, as I love these elements now. Here’s why.
Medal of Honor is a franchise that ostensibly involves real World War II events, but these games are fiction. There was no real life Jimmy Patterson doing espionage, a lot of the stuff they’re doing is mimicking a lot of the cinematic parallels seen in Saving Private Ryan, one of its many inspirations.
When you look back, EA was unsure where to take the franchise once Call of Duty started getting big, and thus their only solution was to take from their competition as inspiration, which came at the cost of the series getting very stale and uninspired. EA Los Angeles implementing all these silly mechanics, all these artistic liberties with the medium, was almost a return to that classic form of “fiction in a real life setting,” whether intentional or not. I gotta give them credit for that.
Medal of Honor: Airborne feels like the end of an era, and they made a fairly solid, if somewhat flawed, game. It’s definitely better than what they tried three years later with the abysmal 2010 reboot of Medal of Honor, where they decided to rip off Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare whole cloth and made a mediocre shooter in the process. I wrote about Medal of Honor (2010) back in 2018, you can check it out here. Be warned, I’m not very kind to that game.
If I was somehow tasked with reviving Medal of Honor as a franchise, I’d be looking more towards Airborne’s template. Upgrading weapons, different objectives to tackle in any order, and just weird goofball stuff that wouldn’t be too out of place in a Wolfenstein video game. Making a straightforward World War II shooter isn’t appealing nowadays, especially if rivals Call of Duty and Battlefield tried to go back to the WWII well repeatedly with mixed results. And it’s not like Medal of Honor was a historically accurate video game franchise, so there’s nothing wrong with Getting Weird with it at this point. Would be nice to see a game try to do.
Medal of Honor: Airborne is available (as of 2026) through the EA Play App, a monthly paid service. You could previously buy this game standalone on digital storefronts, but EA decided that throwing every old game into a vault is the better option. The Xbox 360 version did get put onto the backwards compatibility list for modern Xbox consoles, so that might be an easier choice if you don’t wanna do a little high seas havoc. (After struggling to get my legally purchased game installed on my modern Windows 10 machine, I opted for other methods to acquire the game for this article. Thanks EA!)
I realized so far with each new entry I write about a Medal of Honor game, I’m going backwards from the previous entry. So if my calculations are correct, expect a Medal of Honor: Vanguard or Heroes 2 post in the near future. Or maybe I’ll steer the ship the other way and talk about Medal of Honor: Warfighter. The possibilities are endless, just like the choices I can make on each Airborne level.
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