I'm a big fan of the Medal of Honor Games and was excited to revisit this game for the first time since probably 2005ish.

When I was a kid I was blown away by the graphics and "realism". I never touched it again for almost 20 years.

Revisiting it I found a shooter the mechanically feels good. Controls are responsive. Shooting feels good, etc. it's ambitions and innovative. But it's short comings keep it from being great.

First major issue is that despite "feeling" good to control, the feeling of goodness is occasionally interrupted by an incredibly glitchy experience. Several times I'd be meleed to death through a wall. A enemy soldier would pop out of thin are and 1 shot me, my medic just wouldn't heal me and so on.

The graphics haven't aged great. And it's at this point where I'll make my biggest complaint. Despite the Medal of Honor series's bread and butter being Spielbergy alomst Bond ESC plots where 1 man basically wins the war, this game goes for an almost simulation approach.

An interesting idea but one that's not executed well.

I played on the realism mode. And what found incredibly frustrating is that for a realism mode it's not very realistic. I won't ding it to hard for that, cuz, y'know, 2004 game. But I was hoping for like enemies to drop after 1 bullet, I was hoping for things like suppressing fire to matter, and for ammo conservation to be a factor.

In reality, Realism mode is just harder mode.

This attempt at realism is ultimately the biggest hindrance on the game. Going back to graphics, Medal of Honor Frontline and Allied Assault have a slightly more stylized look and frankly hold up much better, this game went for a more realistic look and hasn't aged as gracefully.

Another ding in this game, again kinda tied into the realism approach. Is that the tone of the game is all over the place. It's honestly having a major identity crisis. It bounces from levels like Pearl Harbor and cut scenes with very "war is hell" dialogue and the bounces to the more traditional lighter Medal of Honor tone that feels more fun. It's very jarring.

The music is also very lacking. MoH has so many iconic tracks and in the rest of the franchise the music compliments the action super well. There is so much fucking silence in the game. Just gun fire and the glitchy pop in of airplane and jungle sounds.

The voice acting I will say however was top notch.

Weapon variety feels kinda lacking and frankly the only guns I found worth using were the Thompson, M1 Garand, Carbine and occasionally the Japanese sniper. The shot gun was possibly the most pathetic shotgun in all of gaming.

There's a good level variety that keeps the game fresh.

Overall it's a mixed bag

Unlike other FPS games, this game feels more like a soldier simulation than a classic shooter. At the beginning of the game you go through a long military training and I'm sure everyone is tired of this boring tutorial. The content of the game is also not like a classic shooter but a game where you manage your soldiers. There are commands where you can order the soldiers to retreat, attack, etc., but I almost never felt the need to use them.You can't heal yourself, instead you call the medic and wait for him to heal you. But this slows down the game extremely. Because you have to stay alive until the medic arrives, then you have to move to a safe zone and watch the animation of the medic healing you for 5-10 seconds. Sometimes, if the medic is healing someone else or is far away, it can cause you to wait too long and die as a result. As I said before, you need to be in a safe area when the medic arrives. Once the medic came so late that the enemies broke my hiding place with their bullets and continued to shoot even while the medic healed me. When the medic healed me, my HP was 3. (When the medic heals you normally, it increases your HP to 100 HP) This made me need the medic again.Apart from that, the missions are extremely boring, all you do is: "Enter the forest, kill the Japanese who are ambushed from the bushes, approach an area where there are Japanese, kill them and repeat this process". The AI is very, very bad. When the Japanese are fighting with your teammates, you can get behind them and kill them all, and they die one by one with almost no reaction. Even though there's a very long distance between us, they start running to stab us to death with the bayonet on the end of their gun. At close range it makes sense, but at far distance it's like they're running at us like they're crazy. We simply shoot and kill. Our team unfortunately has the same artificial intelligence. We are waiting to quietly attack a Japanese area and without my order, my soldiers suddenly start attacking and our location becomes clear. So the game doesn't give you a chance to make a plan. There are a lot of bugs in the game, you get shot from behind the wall, there are situations where the dead soldiers do not fall to the ground, there are even situations where the soldiers on the sniper tower you explode and destroy hang in the air. Some of the weapons are very weak, some of the rifles and scanners are even weaker than some pistols. Enemies may need 5-6 bullets to die from some weapons, especially if you have a rifle that doesn't fire very quickly, this turns into a cruelty.Apart from that, there are some really enjoyable sections where you fight from the ship and so on. But unfortunately, most of them are filled with the same thing. I can't understand how this game came out after Allied Assault.