The best game in the series, and one of the best military shooters ever.

Danger Close (formerly EA Los Angeles) started off with some of the worst takes on the franchise, but improved with each entry, until they finally put out a good game. The Medal of Honor series had really not been in a great place since Allied Assault, and this is the first entry since then to actually deliver a consistently engaging experience throughout its entire campaign.

At its core, it plays more or less like an old school Call of Duty (pre-MW2), with a few noticeable differences. For example, the enemies are harder to hit, but they die quicker, and so do you. This incentivizes you to be more careful and stay in cover, which there is a lot of this time. Level design consistently replicates CoD 2 and CoD 4's best missions, allowing you more room to think strategically and apply different methods to the same situations. Running from cover to cover to progress deeper into the enemy positions is essential, and now you have a slide mechanic to make that easier. I honestly don't get why this mechanic hasn't become a trend in military shooters like health regeneration. It makes so much sense and works so well with this type of gameplay. The cover will often be semi-destructible, which adds dynamism to the gameplay. The game in general feels more realistic than any of its predecessors or contemporaries in the genre. And this is also reflected in how weapons handle. Shotguns are now useful not only in point-blank. Grenades have much smaller radius, and thus are no longer the panacea against large groups of enemies. Another new mechanic is the ability to ask your comrades for ammo, which they will only give you if you stick with your default weapon. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this last one. On one hand, the weapons you are given are always better than those of the enemy, which is also realistic. There's never really a good reason to trade your M4 for an AK-47. On the other hand, this means you're not gonna utilize nearly as many weapons as you would in other games in the genre. However, the single best thing about this game in comparison to CoD is that it's much less linear. It has plenty of stealth missions, but the stealth is never forced upon you. I intentionally disobeyed the order every chance I had, and the game never showed the "mission failed" screen. You're always free to go guns-blazing, but that would only make things harder for yourself.

The game shines in small-scale suspenseful shootouts, and, thankfully, most of the game gives you just that. But it feels like either the devs or the publisher were insecure about their vision, because they often try way too hard to copy Call of Duty. And those sections are when the game really sucks. I'm talking about turret sections, forced sniper sections and that one helicopter mission (which is essentially a glorified turret section). They feel even worse than in Call of Duty because this game doesn't seem to be designed for that. Its general approach to gameplay and presentation clashes hard with the linearity of these sections, making them appear rather as boring distractions that just slow the game down to a crawl.

The story in this game is almost non-existent, which I prefer over the dumbass story of the CoD: MW trilogy. Like it's technically there, but it's just a bunch of soldiers getting in situations and rescuing each other. I like how the game doesn't go out of its way to depict Taliban cartoonishly evil. They appear mostly as just soldiers. It also doesn't try to justify American actions in Afghanistan, clearly portraying the upper command as being out of touch with the situation. This game concerns itself with the troops only and their direct experiences. It does, however end with a cringey tearjerker and a patriotic ramble, which leaves a bad aftertaste.

In conclusion, I think EA and Danger Close truly had something special here. If they ditched the CoD-copying and any attempts at the story, this would've been a 4.5. If they also included missions where you play as Taliban, it could've been a masterpiece, but that game would've never come out. They did add the ability to play as Taliban in multiplayer, and all those dumbass Republicans in America started to freak out. They never had any issue with playable Nazis for some reason, and I bet if this was a game about colonization of America they would also be fine with the ability to play as the genocidal colonizers, but no, not the Taliban, that's going way too far.

One last thing I want to mention is the weird appearance of Chechens in the game. I looked it up, and the official information claims there were Chechens and Uzbeks involved in the operation, even though the Chechen presence is still disputed. Yet we never see any Uzbeks or any other nationalities. I feel like, if Chechens were there, you'd have some Dagestanis and Circassians too, not to mention many neighboring nationalities, such as Iranians, Tajiks, Pakistanis, Uyghurs, etc. Granted, Tajiks and Afghans are practically indistinguishable, but why are there more Chechens than Uzbeks? That doesn't make much sense. And it also seems weird to me that the game portrays Chechens as better trained and better equipped than the Afghan mujaheddin. Why? Chechen mujaheddin are just as stateless as the Afghan ones. In fact, Russia has been cracking down on them much harsher than Afghanistan. Where would they get better training and gear? I'm not an expert on this though, so I'm not ready to blame the game for inaccuracy here. Especially considering how it's like 50 times more realistic and authentic than the CoD: MW series.

I guess the gimmick of the game is its "realism" its based on real events but the game play is still the standard COD styled stuff with regenerating health and brain dead enemy AI. All the realism amounts to is that rather then there being an actual story with crazy set pieces like COD you instead just play through a bunch of loosely connected mini stories in the Afghan war with bland characters where you take out mortar positions and other minor tasks. Like the game expected to tug your heart strings by having one bland burly special forces agent die and gives some US exceptionalism hurrah stuff in 2010, way past the peak of post 9/11 fervor. Oh and there is a subplot where a general guy who sits in a high rise endangers a bunch of soldiers by making dumb decisions which is the vague outline of some social commentary. I can definitely see why this didn't take off at all.

This review is for single-player only.
The Call of Duty games are often criticized as cynical propaganda. I can't speak to whether that's true of the entire series, but as far as the Modern Warfare trilogy [1] goes, I think that this misses the mark. Yes, there is an obvious "Rah! Rah! America is awesome!" theme throughout the trilogy, but this feels more like it a product of the general zeitgeist of military-themed entertainment in the 00s/10s than a specific attempt at pushing an agenda. Modern Warfare is such a tonally inconsistent mish-mash of tropes and devices borrowed from a dozen very different movies that I struggle to see what point is being made by the games other than "killing people is awesome…except when it's not." Propaganda is essentially designed to move people from point A to point B; effective propaganda requires a focus and coherency that the Modern Warfare trilogy never had. So while I can't speak for the later entries in the series, I can say that calling the Modern Warfare trilogy propaganda is vastly overstating the case, because the series just isn't smart enough to do propaganda.
Medal of Honor, on the other hand, is propaganda. It is cynical propaganda. It is a mean-spirited, unambitious, narrow-minded game. Those who are inclined to disagree with the agenda that the game is trying to push will naturally be turned off, but even if you agree with the game's political message, the way that it is portrayed is ineffective.
And make no mistake, the game pushes an agenda. Modern Warfare's storyline is a Hollywood movie pastiche that bears only the slightest resemblance to reality. Medal of Honor, on the other hand, takes place in a real-life warzone and is based on a real-life military operation. The end credits scene has a lengthy tribute to special forces soldiers "fighting for our freedom." There is even a (bad) helicopter level where you shoot up hadjis while a terrible nu-metal song plays in the background. If ever a game wanted you to believe certain things about the U.S. Military and its actions in the Middle East, it was Medal of Honor.
The game is basically a pale imitation of Modern Warfare; like those games, Medal of Honor has you will tromp your way through a short and linear campaign while following the orders of characters who are much cooler than the one you get to play as. The other characters in the game have cool names like "Vegas" and "Panther." You, on the other hand, get to be "Rabbit." You will walk down corridors, wait behind cover while the blood is cleared from your screen, and mindlessly blast your way through hundreds of Bargain Bin Ladens, cleansing your palette occasionally with the worst turret levels in the history of shooting. Instead of the epic setpieces from the Modern Warfare games, we get to ride a four wheeler. Whee! Only one scene (the crash landing of the helicopter as seen from the inside) comes close to the cinematic excitement of your average Modern Warfare mission.
This stripped-down nature of the story might work with more open-ended gameplay (see: Metal Gear Solid V), but when paired with the Call of Duty linear shooter formula it really shows the limits of that game design philosophy. The COD design philosophy works because of the synergy of gameplay and spectacle; take away the spectacle, and the bare-bones nature of the gameplay becomes very apparent. You are supposed to be a badass operator, but you don't get to sneak around and using your own tactics to defeat the enemies, and you don't get to do cool things in awesome scripted setpieces either.
The game just feels mean-spirited on multiple levels. At one point you get knocked down by a terrorist; one of your battle buddies shoots the guy before he shoots you, and then he pulls you up and growls "I just saved your ass." Gee, thanks buddy. Not only does the game put me in a situation where I have to watch someone else do something cool instead of doing it myself, but then that character mouths off at me for doing something that the game forced me to do. 200 or so members of the Afghani allied forces get killed, offscreen, and their deaths are barely discussed; meanwhile, a large part of the plot is based around saving one or two operators who don't even get proper characterization. The game constantly tells you that the Taliban are the bad guys [1], but doesn't ever show them doing anything bad; apparently, just listening to Voodoo or whomever say "these are the bad guys" is enough to justify massacring them as Linkin Park blares in the background. Modern Warfare may have had the sensibilities of a Michael Bay movie as recollected through a drunken haze, but it knew how to hit the most basic emotional notes. It's very clear through Modern Warfare that the Russian Ultranationalists are the bad guys--they set off a nuke, massacre an entire airport as a pretext for an unjust war against America and Western Europe, attack major cities with chemical weapons, target civilians multiple times, and kidnap the Russian president's daughter in order to force him to give them nuclear launch codes. Modern Warfare gives you some very good reasons to feel justified fighting your enemies; Medal of Honor just assumes that you'll want to kill the Taliban because, uh, they’re not American. Voodoo called them "bad guys." Do as I say, soldier.
The story is deadly dull, revolving around a cliche manufactured conflict between the boots-on-the-ground commander and his arrogant superior in Washington. We never see these characters outside of cutscenes and it's not clear why we should care about them. Similarly, we don't get enough characterization of the operators to care about rescuing them; nor are the stakes for their missions ever really made clear. Why do I need to shoot all of these people? What bad thing is going to occur if I don't. The Modern Warfare games involve us in situations with clear high stakes that strongly appeal to our basic emotions--if we don't shoot these guys, then Makarov and his buddies will kill civilians, conquer the U.S. and turn the entire world into a fascist hellhole. Medal of Honor presents us with a situation where we are not involved with no emotional hook and then expects us to care about it.
It would have been simple matter to make the story emotionally compelling. Show me one scene of the operators that we rescue just dicking around on the base, like the tutorial in Modern Warfare 2, and I would actually care about rescuing them. Show us some Taliban opium dealer warlord beating up an innocent old man, or some wide-eyed firm jawed radical telling a little girl she can never go to college, and I'll be ready to turn the entire Shah-i-Kot Valley into spaghetti sauce. You want a good reason to listen to Linkin Park while shooting people in a chopper? The real-life Taliban banned all music except for chants from the Koran. Show some Taliban thugs beating a kid for listening to heavy metal, and then let me put some heavy metal through their skulls. The scenarios practically write themselves, but for some reason the writers of this game decided to go for a story that didn't hit the emotional high notes of a blockbuster action movie, but lacked the moral seriousness and character development needed to pull off a "gritty" war story. There's nothing compelling in this story, nothing that grips the audience and motivates them.
And by failing to effectively motivate the audience, Medal of Honor fails as propaganda. Whether or not that is a good thing for the world as a whole is up to you to decide, but taken on its own terms, Medal of Honor is an artistic failure. In terms of pure gameplay, it is dull and derivative. And as an overall experience, it will inspire boredom from those inclined to agree with its message and revulsion from those inclined to disagree. In short, it's a game that has no reason to exist and no reason to be played. I do not recommend Medal of Honor.


[1] Henceforth Modern Warfare for convenience.
[1] This game uses the phrase "bad guys" almost as much as Far Cry 6 uses "guerilla" and it's just as annoying.

I hate this game. Maybe the hate is a little unwarranted, but its just so forgettable. In fact I beat the campaign last night and I can barely remember it. Now I am not an FPS snob by any means. I love a crappy FPS. Shell-shocked 2, Soldier of fortune, Rogue warrior, hell even Turning point had an interesting concept. But this, this is just bland. Jump through a 10 level romp around very similarly rocky locations, fighting the same group of enemies with basically the same weapons. It handles fine. The graphics are fine. The story is fine. There's just something about it that seems so unnecessary. I mean this was the era of Call of Duty and Battlefield Bad Company, and you can see this game borrows heavily from them. Heavy scripted shooting sections in modern times with some gruff real american heroes by your side. You can forgive Danger Close Games for trying to tap into this popularity. And there is the Tier 1 mode which adds a bit of challenge and replay ability to the game. I just really can't recommend this, even to hardcore FPS fans.

I was still in college when I played this. This was the time of Modern Warfare and MW2 supremacy - I had become all starry eyed after playing MW2, and was absolutely in love with shooters.

It is at that time that Medal of Honor came out. The game wasn't as smooth as the call of duty games used to feel, but the fact that the game was rooted in real events after 9/11 gave it a sense of realism. The characters in AFO Wolfpack and Neptune also just seemed more like the special forces operatives that I had imagined in my head - especially the likes of Dusty, Deuce, Voodoo and Mother. So in every sense of the word, the game felt real, and it felt amazing to step into these guys' shoes. I think the game did a fantastic job of recreating the whole look and feel of Afghanistan, with its vast beautiful landscapes.

Lastly, the weapon systems and vehicles. Again, not as smooth as in COD, but they always felt real-er. Be it the quad vehicle in running with wolves, or using the heavy duty sniper rifles when playing as Deuce, or calling in the A-10 warthogs, or calling missile strikes on the tanks - the game was a blast.

To me, it is always about the feeling. This game just left behind a gritty feeling of realism , and heroism to my mind. One of my favorite story + shooters

Несмотря что на данный момент игре уже практически семь лет, в нее до сих пор можно поиграться и успешно скрыть из библиотеки.

Игра престаляет из себя тир про бравых американцев которые в Афганистане сеют демократию налево и направо, жертвуют тремя вертолетами и целой толпой солдат для того что бы в итоге понять что "разведка обосралась" и вытащить четырех спецназовцев с верхушки безымянной горы.

Не сказать что игра плоха, это обычный проходнячек на пару расслабленных вечеров. Для тех кто уже огребал в жестоких шутерах эта игра покажется очень скучной и пресной. Но если ты лютый казуальщик - Медаль за Отвагу принесет тебе удовольствие и даже вдохновит поиграть во что-нибуть посерьезнее.

По графике могу сказать что она не вызывает тошноту после современных игр. Да, видно отсутствие современных шейдеров и директиксов, но картинка не особо режет глаза.