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Tag: World War II

  • Medal of Honor: Airborne – Where are we dropping, gentlemen?

    Medal of Honor: Airborne – Where are we dropping, gentlemen?

    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.

    Once more, into the airplane…

    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.

    These title cards being rendered in the wild is a neat touch.

    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.

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  • Enemy Front, possibly the true successor to Medal of Honor.

    Enemy Front, possibly the true successor to Medal of Honor.

    Welcome to the first Secret Area post of 2019. Here’s something that was several months in the making. This was mostly due to procrastination. Naturally, I’m writing about a game I finished last year, two days short of a year after I had beaten it. And it’s a callback to a post I made last June. Let’s do this.

    Last year, I had written a somewhat scathing review of the 2010 Medal of Honor reboot, which took the legacy of a long-standing WWII FPS franchise and basically ruined it by being a Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare copycat. You can check that post out here. At the end of that post, I had hinted towards a game that I had said was just as close to the original Medal of Honor games.

    Okay, it’s a bit of a stretch, but it is a World War II FPS, and surprisingly a decent one at that.

    Enemy Front was a shooter released in 2014 for various platforms, including PC. Released by CI Games, it was a fairly unknown budget shooter in an era where those kind of shooters were slowly disappearing due to the drought of retail games as well as the prevalence of Steam making it a newer (and cheaper!) haven for the cheap schlock of the past.

    I had heard of it thanks to a certain YouTube personality. Ahoy – later a maker of wonderful flashy documentaries about Doom, Half-Life, the Amiga, and many others – had done a video chronicling the arsenal of Enemy Front. He had done similar videos before for Call of Duty and other franchises, and would later be revised to an all-purpose format with his Iconic Arms series of videos. I’m still waiting for the new season of Iconic Arms, just to see what games he uses as an example for the weapon he’s talking about.

    Though, it wasn’t just a British YouTube personality talking about a budget polish-developed FPS’s weaponry that got me to snag Enemy Front. It was also dirt cheap on a Steam sale. All it takes is something to be under $5 and you’ve caught my interest almost immediately.

    Broadcasting your war diaries doesn’t sound like a good idea to me.

    Enough preamble. Let’s get to the meat and actually talk about Enemy Front proper. You play as American journalist Robert Hawkins as he reports the stories of a resistance front all around Europe. Hawkins’s voice sounds familiar to me. There’s no voice cast in the game itself, and IMDB only gives a brief unconfirmed list. I swear I heard him in that infamous Duty Calls game I also wrote about long ago, but there’s no proper credits for that one (or for Enemy Front).

    Later meeting up with resistance fighters, Hawkins must stop the Nazi menace in various locales around Europe, including during the Warsaw Uprising. A fair share of the game takes place around that Polish conflict. It’s fitting, considering developer/publisher CI Games is based in Warsaw, Poland.

    Human shields are a good way to be threatening. Until they realize you just grabbed some expendable low-ranking goon.
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