PAX Prime 2010 – Medal of Honor (2010): Hands-on Impressions

Medal of Honor was on hand at PAX 2010. I was looking forward to getting some play time with it, as it’s probably the game I’m looking forward to most this holiday season. As my Retrospective series has been showing, I love the franchise, and I’ve been anxious to see what this new rebooted take on the franchise will be like.

I got hands-on time with a 24-player multiplayer demo set up at their booth. The map they showed off was new to me, unlike either of the maps in this past summer’s beta. It was set in the snowy mountaintops where a helicopter had crashed. One team, which starts the map near the crashed helicopter, had to navigate to another extraction point in the map while the other team tried to hold them off. It plays very similar to your standard control point style map, with an added minor narrative element on top of it.

The visuals looked top notch. If you’ve seen any video of the game, it’s still that great, only even better with the added polishing time. The game plays as a standard shooter, the biggest standout being Scorechains. After you’ve amassed a certain amount of points, you’re rewarded with a scorechain reward. These rewards are as simple as being able to see your enemies on the maps to awarding flak jackets to your teammates, which extended their durability. It’s functionally similar to Call of Duty‘s killstreak rewards, so if you’re familiar with that, you’ll understand their use here.

The biggest hinderance I personally had was the use of PCs for the demos, as I am primarily a console gamer. This is hardly a knock on the game itself, but I felt unable to get a good grasp of the game and map, and by the time I did, the match was essentially over. The game also doesn’t really stand out in any way, at least in the multiplayer. It feels like a hybrid of Call of Duty and Battlefield Bad Company 2. With DICE being the developer of the multiplayer portion, it’s not too surprising that there are similarities to their hit Battlefield franchise. However, by playing it somewhat safe, they might alienate fans of both franchises. There’s still much more to revealed about the entire game, so it’s much too soon to say what the reception will be.

As a bigger fan of single player gaming in general, I’m more interested in that aspect of the game, but the multiplayer for Medal of Honor seems to be competent even if it doesn’t tend to stand out. We’ll find out how all the pieces of the game come together later this fall.

Medal of Honor releases for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC on October 12th, published by Electronic Arts and developed by Danger Close (single player) and DICE (multiplayer).