Medal of Honor: Warfighter is a funny name. Yes, "Warfighter" is a term with a real-life military application, but that doesn't stop it from sounding incredibly silly. It is gratuitously macho, not to mention rather redundant. It is, however, a perfectly fitting name for one of the many annual "me too" military first-person shooters that hit the market toward the end of the year.
It is, in fact, the perfect name for Danger Close's latest offering. If Warfighter is anything, it's as gratuitous as it is redundant.
Medal of Honor: Warfighter (PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 [reviewed]) Developer: Danger Close Publisher: Electronic Arts Release: October 23, 2012 MSRP: $59.99
Medal of Honor: Warfighter takes the uniformity of the military FPS to its logical, strained conclusion. In both its single-player campaign and competitive online mode, it is a "Who's Who" of every overplayed stereotype the genre has to offer. Crossing off an invisible checklist of must-have features, Warfighter plays it absolutely safe, doing very little to rock the boat, but even less to capture the imagination.
First things first, the single-player mode is abysmal. For the most part, it's another common romp through the Middle East and other war-torn parts of the world, as players hide behind crates and shoot at silhouettes spawning across murky arenas of nondescript space. So linear and formulaic is each mission, it comes across less like the "EXTREME REALISM" of modern combat and more like a cheap, slow fairground ride. There is an attempt at a story, featuring characters that make no impression and a villain that appears for no other reason than to be an obligatory foreign bad guy. In short, it's a tacky and melodramatic look at military life with a script that could have been trotted out by a twelve-year-old. Just like so many others.
Worst of all, the game regularly attempts to grab for the heartstrings by introducing a wife and a daughter to one of the interchangeable protagonists -- attempts that fail partly because the writing is so corny, and mostly because the character models are horrendously creepy, clearly being designed by artists who have never had to draw females before. Yes, Danger Close, women do exist -- but they don't look like sheets of pink latex pulled taut over a chimpanzee's skeleton.
The campaign takes players on a tour through familiar and increasingly weary scenarios -- there's the boat level, the city streets, the customary shoot-out in an Arabian village, the moonlit stealth adventure, the sniping section, and the expected helicopter level. Warfighter seems content to just go through the motions with most of its campaign, copying entire scenarios from its own reboot, as well as Battlefield and Call of Duty, to create a set of missions that feel like the videogame equivalent of a TV series clip show.
In fairness, there are a few brief glimmers of originality, mostly coming from those levels where shooting isn't part of the action. A couple of car chases, one of which becomes a surprisingly effective vehicular stealth challenge, manage to offer welcome sanctuary from the rest of the story's relentless shooting gallery. They're not exactly exciting, but they're something else, and that's all that matters. Sadly, they are but brief flashes of respite among a brown sea of brown guns firing brown bullets in brown deserts.
Outside of such momentary flickers of newness, the rest of the game is a one-note song droned repeatedly from beginning to end. Every single level plays out the same way, albeit with different (yet wholly familiar) setpieces.
Boasting a cover system that barely works, the action of Warfighter gets stale within the first few minutes and never freshens up, as players pick their fragile way from chest-high wall to chest-high wall, popping off the clairvoyant -- yet nonetheless stupid -- enemies who are one scream of "Durka Durka" away from becoming Team America stereotypes. As seems to be increasingly common with games of this nature, there's no sense of pacing or tension. The stakes never feel high and the action never heats up, because nothing ever happens. For the five or six hours the campaign lasts, not once does anything actually happen in it. Bullets are fired, people fall over screaming, but ultimately nothing memorable occurs, and nothing changes from that first shot fired to that last generic terrorist killed. It is just shooting. Ducking behind boxes and shooting. Forever.
Most egregious of all is the fact that door breaching is now championed as the prime feature of the experience. Any player of military FPS games should be familiar with breaching -- you stand outside a door, kick it open, toss in a flashbang, and then pop off the startled enemies in slow-motion. Most campaigns use them once or twice in order to provide something a little different, though these days it's becoming tacky in its overuse. Naturally, Warfighter took that overuse and made a farce of it. The first hour of Warfighter has more breaching in it than entire games do, and like everything else, it's always the same bloody thing. You kick a door, and kill folks in slow motion. It was already getting old before this game even released. Danger Close has officially murdered it.
Still, if you score enough headshots in slow-motion, you can unlock the option to open the door with an axe or a crowbar instead of kicking it. Hardly feels like a reward, though, when you realize kicking the thing is quicker and gets the whole sorry display over with more efficiently.
After years of military shooters, the single-player portion of Warfighter just comes off as depressing. It's sad to play through the same old stuff I've played countless times before, and I say this as a fan of the genre. I still think there's life in the military FPS, but not the way this game does it. Not with such a lack of creative ambition and a steadfast refusal to give us even the slightest motivation to care about what's happening. Even after beating it, I still don't know why I was supposed to hate any of the villains. I know the "heroes" of the piece hated them, but I didn't like any of them much either. Nobody gave me a reason to be quite so invested. Call of Duty has its ludicrous-but-satisfying story, Battlefield has its energy and vehicle variety, but Medal of Honor has no identity. It is merely a hollow reflection of the market leaders, too timid to strike out on its own.
The multiplayer, of course, is clearly where Danger Close put all its effort, and while it does little to stand out from the ever-swelling pack, it's certainly not bad, and at least provides a more compelling competitive arena than the last Medal of Honor did.
The one thing it truly does differently is the "Fire Team" system, an admittedly inventive little idea that blends co-op gameplay with traditional competitive battles. In each match, players will be paired up to form Fire Teams, and will be responsible for providing benefits to each other. An active player will serve as a walking spawn point for his or her teammate, and can also hand out health/ammo replenishment. What's more, players will get to earn points for their partner's successes, and each team will be judged as a duo more than individuals.
The psychological effect of the Fire Team system is quite noticeable. I found myself more willing to stay out of harm's way as my partner was spawning in, allowing him to appear quicker and safer. I also regularly kept my teammate stocked up and felt vengeful when he died, despite him being a complete stranger. It's a great idea that adds a little rewarding extra level to the combat.
Outside of this new feature, you're looking at a fairly standard multiplayer affair, no matter how much it tries to obscure the fact by assaulting you with information. From the very moment you jump in (after installing the massive patch, setting up Origin, and inputting an online pass), you're introduced to a screen littered with options and pop-up info boxes. Designed to resemble a post-modern website, the lobby screen is full of tabs and windows allowing you to view your Battlelog social networking nonsense, customize your weapons, and pick your own squad of playable soldiers using six classes made up of characters from a whole host of different nations, each country carrying its own set of special equipment. There is a ton of content, but once you know where everything is, you realize it's more of the same, thrust violently down your throat in the hopes that you swallow too quickly to realize you've eaten it before.
The actual gameplay itself is similarly busy, shoving text and explosions at the player with such wanton abandon, it's initially alienating in its chaos. However, after a few rounds, the style-over-utility visual information starts to make sense, and you settle into a rather bland -- but totally serviceable -- online shooter that really could be interchanged with any other.
That's really the big problem with Medal of Honor: Warfighter -- it has no big problem. It has no great highlight, either. The Fire Team dynamic is a neat twist, but ultimately it's not enough to save the overall experience from pointlessness. Warfighter is a largely pointless game. It exists simply to be just another brown FPS, and in that endeavor it undoubtedly succeeds. As with the single-player mode, you shoot people, they fall down, but nothing really happens. You just go through the motions, doing the same stuff you've been doing for the past five years.
These games have now gotten to a point where they need to do more than expand the content. Warfighter is officially one game too many. When even Call of Duty realizes it needs to move away from the "modern warfare" setting and try new things, you know the good times are over. Sadly, Danger Close didn't get the memo, so it dutifully trotted out more of the regular fluff in an attempt to keep up with what everybody else has been doing for half a decade. Ironically, it would have been better served if it never rebooted in 2010 and stuck with World War II -- barely anybody's doing those games anymore.
It is also quite clear the studio rushed development to get out ahead of the competition, demonstrating what a soulless pissing contest these games have become. It suffers from a litany of visual and audio glitches, with cutscenes particularly afflicted by stuttering framerate, poorly compressed visuals, and horrible audio pops. In-game, there are issues with enemies spawning before the player's very eyes, bodies disappearing or freezing mid-air, and bits of scenery having epileptic fits. Important things like notes about sniper rifle bullet drop had to be patched in, and even then, they weren't patched in well. The information appears briefly, once, and then never again, even if you miss it or have to restart the section.
Not to mention, the game just doesn't look very good. Aside from a few nice lighting effects, its graphical offerings are severely unimpressive, with poor textures and dated character models that do little to make the brown, dreary art style any less dismal. This is all after installing the optional texture patch provided on the 360 disc.
Medal of Honor: Warfighter is for the kind of person who goes into a bar and asks for the usual every single night, not even vaguely curious about trying something else for a change. It's not entirely Warfighter's fault -- it didn't know that, after five years of Activision and EA releasing several military shooters a year, it would be the straw that broke the camel's back. As I said, I still like these kinds of shooters, but the core idea has stopped being compelling on its own, and new games desperately require something to identify them. Just running through the same old routine isn't working anymore.
I believe it's telling that every screenshot on this review was provided with a giant logo bearing the name's game. Even the publisher realizes how homogeneous these titles have become, that a screenshot alone is not enough to tell which one we're actually talking about.
It doesn't help that previous titles simply do what Warfighter does better. Danger Close implemented a curious little co-op flavor, but it's attached to a bog-standard shooting experience that can be better enjoyed in last year's games. The only thing this latest Medal of Honor has going for it is a noisier presentation and an avalanche of content, none of which matters when the core gameplay is so mind-numbingly dull at this point in time.
Charmless, cynical, and uninspired, Warfighter encapsulates everything wrong with the annual big budget shooter industry. It's really not an awful game, it's just insipid and shallow, a title that exists solely to exist, and squeeze whatever profit remains to be had from serving the same flavorless porridge to the same unadventurous customers. It will make its money, and keep the FPS factories in business for another year.
To anybody working on these games who have a shred of creative integrity: I hope the money is worth it.
THE VERDICT
5.0 /10
Mediocre: An exercise in apathy, neither Solid nor Liquid. Not exactly bad, but not very good either. Just a bit 'meh,' really. Check out more reviews or the Destructoid score guide.
Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon (formerly known as Luigi's Mansion 2) is almost here. True to the game's ghostly allure, details around the game's corporal existence remain shrouded in contiguity. Is this thing even... more
Monster Hunter 4 is no doubt going to be a massive win for the 3DS. The combination of traction Nintendo's handheld already has, along with the massive install base, and the incredible success of the Monster Hunter ... more
Some time ago, Jonathan Holmes reviewed BlayzBloo: Super Melee Brawlers Battle Royale. It was a pretty quaint release that was forgotten almost immediately.
But now, it looks like a full sequel is upon us, ready to grace the... more
An hour after taking the stage to unveil Disney Infinity, "Disney's most ambitious video game initiative ever" (a press release states), I sat down with Avalanche Studios chief creative officer John Blackburn to discuss where... more
Yes, finally! I've been waiting quite some time for the US re-release of Kirby's Star Stacker (3DS eShop), and now it's finally upon us.
As for everything else, it's not a whole lot this week. There's a free demo for Fire Emb... more
Want to know what's coming for your Wii U and/or 3DS? Nintendo has us covered with a list of first- and third-party releases for both systems as well as their respective eShop titles. Hell, they even threw in the kiddie DS ti... more
Nintendo has posted a new video for Fire Emblem: Awakening, and it's a great introduction for people who have never played the series before.
It goes over the basics like the general story, troop placement, and general tips ... more
It seems as the North American and European release date for the long-awaited Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate is finally upon us: March 19th and 22nd respectively.
It'll launch in both 3DS and Wii U form (the latter of which is ca... more
According to a Nikkei report, Nintendo plans to merge its console and handheld divisions next month. On February 16, the company is prepared to bring 130 console engineers and 150 handheld engineers together under a single ro... more
In a recent interview, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata dove into some interesting topics, most notably the Miiverse and how it came about. Iwata also reiterates that the Wii U GamePad can transcend just a gaming audience with... more
Hey, Television! Check out Double Fine’s latest game for Xbox Live Arcade: Kinect Party. In fun-loving Double Fine fashion, it was released for free upon launch in mid-December until the New Year. For those of you who d...more
DmC: Devil May Cry is an insult. It insults the fans, who have loyally supported Capcom through thick and thin, and it insults the legacy of a most respected action series. Ninja Theory has spat upon one of the last pure name...more
The original Fire Pro Wrestling was a game specifically for the hardcore fans of pro wrestling. I'm not talking about the male soap-opera that is WWE, but a more brutal version such as some of the Japanese wrestling circuits ...more
Joe Danger was the definition of a perfect downloadable game. It was reasonable priced, it was tons of fun, and it was packed with content.
Naturally, since a lot of other people felt the same, a Special Edition version of th...more
The time has finally come. After numerous delays, and nearly a year of waiting after the Japanese release, Max Anarchy, known internationally as Anarchy Reigns, is finally here.
Conceptually, the game is basically a "Greatest...more
Imagine for a moment that you have the power to make videogames. OK, I guess you don't have to imagine. With tools like Unity, Game Maker, and Flash on the market readily available to anyone who puts their mind towards snaggi...more
Seduce Me is only on our radar because it was developed by folks who worked on the Triple-A Killzone franchise, and later denied a place on Steam's Greenlight project. We likely wouldn't have noticed it, much l...more
Maybe it's just me, but it seems that every once in a while there is a game that comes out that makes a statement about MMORPGs. That the best part of those games is the player-versus-player segments. In 2007, there was the "...more
The Sims series will always have expansion packs. It's part of the experience to slowly add more content to the game. Usually these packs add active content like new town locations, new interactions, or new career paths for y...more
I've just saved the planet, and I couldn't be less enthused about it. A New Beginning is a self-styled eco-thriller with a spot of time travel and science fiction thrown in for good measure. It launched in Europe a couple of ...more
It used to cost ridiculous amounts of money to record video from other sources, especially in HD. But these past few years companies like Hauppague, Pinnacle, AVerMedia and others have released affordable boxes that...more
A game that combines ideas from both Minecraft and Team Fortress 2 sounds like it would be a match made in heaven. The LEGO-style buildings and aesthetics combined with the multi-class gameplay should be right up my alley.
Ye...more
Capcom's treatment of the Mega Man franchise these past couple of years has been atrocious. When Street Fighter kicked off its 25th anniversary, Capcom clearly laid out its plans for the coming year, which included key softwa...more
Pirates and Vikings have a lot of things in common. Pillaging, raiding, exploration, and adventure -- these are their shared loves. One could be forgiven for assuming that they might even be able to get along, but that is mos...more
“How dare you? HOW DARE YOU! How dare you review a Lord of the Rings game without having every film box set in a display case! HOW DARE YOU review a MOBA without having been yelled at and debased by 12-year-olds for m...more
It’s not very often that I get a chance to review something bad. It’s even rarer for me to come across headphones that I just hate. Truth is, most things that you spend $50 or more on are pretty good. Mediocrity c...more
The Guild01 collection is a very special project that I'm glad we could be a part of. Although the last game in the set isn't slated for a release out of Japan, the mere fact that Level-5 decided to take a chance with any of ...more
Within my first thirty minutes of playing Black Knight Sword, I encountered a menu option called "cat head grass," a giant mother eye that eats hearts, and severed skulls in a microwave oven that serve as health power-ups.
Yep, this is definitely a Grasshopper Manufacture joint.more