Look I'd love to just write "we have Modern Warfare at home" and end it there, but no, Medal of Honor 2010 is waayyy worse.
Good things first: The score is actually great and I wish it was part of a better game. Same applies to the Linkin Park song used during the credits (what's up with Linkin Park being everywhere during the late 00s?). There's a single mission I enjoyed, and I guess the gunplay is occasionally serviceable, at least when it's not ruined by the weird mouse input.
Everything else is just varying degrees of awful. Unlike the long dead multi-player part, the campaign runs on Unreal Engine 3 and looks exactly like you'd expect a generic military fps in this engine to look: incredibly ugly, almost as ugly as the ui. The game's story is similarly generic and an incoherent mess filled with stereotypical characters.
As if all of that wasn't bad enough, the game is also very buggy. I'm not talking about the occasional animation bug or flickering texture, no, this game will force you to replay entire mission! Occasionally, your teammates will get stuck on level props and not move any further. Doesn't sound that bad when you consider how stupid their ai is, but once you reach the next scripted event, the game will not proceed since one of the NPCs needed to trigger the script is missing - you're stuck.
In a case like that, even loading a checkpoint won't work, since a lot of the time the NPC got stuck before the checkpoint save was created and will still be stuck upon reloading, somewhere in a now inaccessible part of the level. Just imagine having to constantly keep track of all the soldiers running around in Call of Duty, or Elizabeth in Bioshock, just in case they get stuck... I had to replay not one, but TWO missions because of this bug! Including the final fucking mission of the game in its entirety, since the script that didn't trigger was what was keeping me from the final cinematic and the end of the game!
It gets worse: the game's story has aged incredibly awful. This is a game that portrays the fucking War in Afghanistan as a noble cause fought by heroic US troops that they'd surely win, if it wasn't for those evil bureaucrats in Washington. The game has the audacity to make you conquer Bagram airbase during a mission, a place that would later be used as a prison, with the Red Cross reporting multiple human rights violations, including inmates being tortured. The devs couldn't have known how the overall situation in Afghanistan would ultimately develop, but the Bagram prison torture had already been reported on for years when the game came out in 2010. Reactions at the time of release were more focused on the fact that the multi-player let players play AS THE FUCKING TALIBAN, which I still cannot believe is something that made it into a commercially released game.
This game is a buggy, incoherent mess, dragged down even further by its absolutely tone deaf political messaging. Unless you want to see how bad it is for yourself, or you're looking into it for research purposes, I genuinely don't see a reason for anyone to play this.
Good things first: The score is actually great and I wish it was part of a better game. Same applies to the Linkin Park song used during the credits (what's up with Linkin Park being everywhere during the late 00s?). There's a single mission I enjoyed, and I guess the gunplay is occasionally serviceable, at least when it's not ruined by the weird mouse input.
Everything else is just varying degrees of awful. Unlike the long dead multi-player part, the campaign runs on Unreal Engine 3 and looks exactly like you'd expect a generic military fps in this engine to look: incredibly ugly, almost as ugly as the ui. The game's story is similarly generic and an incoherent mess filled with stereotypical characters.
As if all of that wasn't bad enough, the game is also very buggy. I'm not talking about the occasional animation bug or flickering texture, no, this game will force you to replay entire mission! Occasionally, your teammates will get stuck on level props and not move any further. Doesn't sound that bad when you consider how stupid their ai is, but once you reach the next scripted event, the game will not proceed since one of the NPCs needed to trigger the script is missing - you're stuck.
In a case like that, even loading a checkpoint won't work, since a lot of the time the NPC got stuck before the checkpoint save was created and will still be stuck upon reloading, somewhere in a now inaccessible part of the level. Just imagine having to constantly keep track of all the soldiers running around in Call of Duty, or Elizabeth in Bioshock, just in case they get stuck... I had to replay not one, but TWO missions because of this bug! Including the final fucking mission of the game in its entirety, since the script that didn't trigger was what was keeping me from the final cinematic and the end of the game!
It gets worse: the game's story has aged incredibly awful. This is a game that portrays the fucking War in Afghanistan as a noble cause fought by heroic US troops that they'd surely win, if it wasn't for those evil bureaucrats in Washington. The game has the audacity to make you conquer Bagram airbase during a mission, a place that would later be used as a prison, with the Red Cross reporting multiple human rights violations, including inmates being tortured. The devs couldn't have known how the overall situation in Afghanistan would ultimately develop, but the Bagram prison torture had already been reported on for years when the game came out in 2010. Reactions at the time of release were more focused on the fact that the multi-player let players play AS THE FUCKING TALIBAN, which I still cannot believe is something that made it into a commercially released game.
This game is a buggy, incoherent mess, dragged down even further by its absolutely tone deaf political messaging. Unless you want to see how bad it is for yourself, or you're looking into it for research purposes, I genuinely don't see a reason for anyone to play this.