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.

The Medal of Honor franchise was EA's answer to Call of Duty and it was a tiny bit better early on. Allied Assault and it's expansion packs were great and what followed up Allied Assault was a bunch of PS2 games, which were kind of okay or pretty great.

Pacific Assault was the long awaited return to PC, the next entry in the franchise that had such a great streak and look how they killed it. Some call the 2010 reboot the nail in the coffin when it comes to MoH, but this right here was the first nail.

Pacific Assault focuses on, you guessed it, the pacific theatre of WW2 and to be fair, MoH already dealt with this in Medal of Honor: Rising Sun, which was exclusive to PS2.

This one however was "unique", because they added squad commands, semi realistic gun fights and overall a cinematic approach portraying this war.

What makes this one a really difficult game to enjoy is the brain dumb AI that you need to deal with, because the game has a new death system. If your HP drops to zero, you faint away and you need to be picked up by a medic who has 4-5 medpacks for you, and after that it is game over.

The optimal situation would be: You start the dying process --> medic picks you up.

What normally happens is that you lie there on the ground, while the doc watches you and you die OR a soldier comes to beat you up with his rifle and then you die.

If this is not enough, the aim down sight mechanic is down right broken, you are more precise with hipfiring and the worst of all is that often times, you cannot hit the enemy because of invisible walls.

A thicker bush? A fence? You cannot hit who is behind them, because the game registers the objects as a solid surface. Combine all this and some way too long turret sections, cheesy acting and you get the worst game in this franchise by far.

Avoid Pacific Assault as much as you can. I abandoned it this time, but I played it all the way trough when I was younger and thank god that I bailed out, because I do not want to experience the plane mission all over again.

“If WWII Was Cinematically Subpar”

I don’t remember too much from my time with this game. I remember the shooting was extremely bland, the story and characters generic as all hell, and the presentation being typical for your mid-2000’s WWII shooter. There was no satisfying gore system like in “Call of Duty: World At War”. There wasn’t a squad commander function like in “Brothers in Arms” (though even in that game the system was janky at times). There wasn’t really anything particularly distinguishing about this title at all…

Shooting felt like you aimed “around” an enemy and fired enough until you eventually hit them. Additionally, the environments were repetitive and lacked interesting scenarios where you would encounter opponents. Your squadmates would chirp in your ear about generic military jargon, and the story just seemed run-of-the-mill. All in all, I would Not Recommend this title.

Final Verdict: 2/10 (Bad)

It is one of the last of its kind, the first wave of the cinematic shooters of the early 2000s, and it really shows.

The "cinematic" sections are hit or miss. Bigger scale battles are usually just defending a single place while the Banzai charge comes wave after wave. There are some nice change of pace, like the Tarawa landing and the flyboys mission, but it feels like most of the levels are just going through one jungle after another in a linear line, occassionally stopping to clear out a Japanese encampment.

Then there is the gunplay. The hit-detection is really abysmal, it's hard to know whether you hit an enemy successfully or not because the damage animation for the enemies is just bad. Not only that, even the bolt-action rifles are not guaranteed to hit the target you are aimining at, sometimes missing for inexplicable reason. Then there is the submachine guns that are a tad too weak even considering the game's arcade-like nature. Also, the reloading is just absolutely horrendous, taking too long in many cases (not sure why he's so gentle when pushing the clipped ammo into bolt-action rifles), adding to the poor gunplay. Some guns having blatantly incorrect reload animation doesn't help either.

While it's good to really have your squadmates all the time, unlike Allied Assault where they just die out mid-way through a mission every time, but they are not really interesting characters--so far to the point I don't actually know which one has which name.

You can't exactly argue that it is technically a generation before Call of Duty 2, it really is only a year apart--and this game is a PC exclusive so it really shouldn't have that excuse to begin with. And somehow, it still manages to slow down in my machine that came out 13 years after.

EA Los Angeles went from developing an absolutely horrendous expansion for one of the best WWII-themed shooters of all time to developing this very subpar sequel. I suppose you can call it an improvement.

This game is weird. It's like the devs didn't have enough experience with the engine and EA didn't give them enough time or resources to learn. Graphically, it's a mixed bag. You will see some incredible (for 2004) textures and shadows on the characters next to extremely blurry and flat textures on objects in the background within the same shot. From the aesthetical point of view it's also weird. For some reason the game is covered in shades of yellow, orange and brown, making every mission look like it's taking place at a sunset (my least favorite time of the day). All animations and physics are very jittery and have a tendency to spazz out.

Gameplaywise it's very difficult to understand the direction the devs were taking. It's like the game is trying to be more realistic with all the new immersive features they've added (like bandaging wounds, commanding your squard, etc.), yet at the same time they constantly swarm you with hordes of enemies like in some Serious Sam game. And enemies like running in crowds too, which makes killing them very boring. There's constantly loud music playing and things exploding. Yet with all that, the game still fails to be engaging.

Games of this subgenre tend to have linear levels and dumb AI, but that's usually offset by polished level design, immersive art design and balanced structure. This game has none of that. You basically run from enclosed area to enclosed area and mow down hordes of dumb enemy soldiers. Occasionally there are absolutely intolerable turret sections and escort missions. Scripted sequences often don't go as planned even when you follow what they told you to do. The game utterly fails to sell you the illusion of exploring the jungles with your squadmates.

All new features feel more like nuisances. Commanding your squad is not fun and pointless. Bandaging wounds takes no skill and ends up being busywork. The newly-implemented ironsights take too long to use, yet now that they exist the game expects you to use them. Allied Assault worked fine without them because the game was built around the mechanics it had. But here a lot of enemies are intentionally placed too far, yet these ironsights barely help at all. The game has so many invisible walls that I would often shoot at enemies in the distance only to realize they're invincible because there's an invisible wall in the way.

But the worst thing about Pacific Assault is that beyond all its clunkiness and design flaws, it's just boring. From its (by 2004) pretty tired presentation and subpar scripted sequences to its poorly functioning and shallow gameplay.

2004 was a year where WWII games were at their peak, Rising Sun was a huge disappointment, so EA went after the Pacific theater again with Pacific Assault. The game was much better than Rising Sun and was a graphical showcase. It pushed PCs to their limits back then and was a solid shooter. The only problem was that it didn’t advance the series’ formula at all and was just another shooting gallery. It did have some great cinematic moments and showed what Medal of Honor could really do on better hardware. The consoles couldn’t handle what Pacific Assault was able to do to it remained the last PC exclusive MoH game.

The game starts out with the storming of Ottawa Atoll Beach on November 20, 1943, 8 months before the French D-Day that is so famous. The game takes you through the jungles of Japan in some pretty gnarly guerrilla warfare. There’s lush flora in your way, and the Pacific theater was a huge change of scenery from all the European battles everyone was tired of. Many new weapons were introduced like the Japanese weapons and some others like the Riot Gun. One scene has you carrying an MG to set up an ambush along a river. You can pick it up and move it. It’s nice to see things like this in WWII games but there just isn’t enough like that.

Most of the campaign was just endless jungles and disabling this machine gun nest, eliminate those patrols. It repeated over and over for about 6-8 hours. The one mission where you were on a plane was nice because you controlled the rear MG and then took over the plane itself. The controls were a bit hard to get used to because the whole thing is controlled with just the mouse. The game was relentlessly difficult like all Medal of Honor games. You couldn’t refill your plane’s health so if you died you restarted the entire level or your last quick save. The checkpoints are spread very far apart sorely on constantly quick saving otherwise you will be angry. I also didn’t like the default control setup. Aiming was done with Left Alt and melee was done with the right mouse button. What kind of controls are those?! I had to change them manually.

The game is also full of bugs and glitches. Most were patched but some still exist. The game crashes every so often, friendly AI gets in your way to where you can’t advance and have to enable the developer console and use no clip to get through them. The biggest issue is that you have a health bar and can’t refill it with health packs. Once you die a corpsman will come heal you if you’re lucky. They only came sometimes and I died often because of the stupid AI. Why not give me health packs like older MoH games? With that aside, the weapons feel great to shoot and the action is solid. There’s a lot going on screen, but the framerate can’t keep up with the action. Back in the day, everyone thought it was because the engine pushed PCs too hard, now that PCs are way more advanced it’s just the engine. I got 60 FPS most of the time then suddenly it dropped below 20 for no reason.

Pacific Assault is a solid shooter, and if you missed out on this try it out. Almost any computer can run this game these days, so there’s no excuse not to. Pacific Assault is also one of the better Medal of Honor games and really advanced the series past the dated gameplay from Rising Sun and back.