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.