Medal of Honor: Frontline

aka: MOHF, Medal of Honor: En Première Ligne
Moby ID: 6826
PlayStation 2 Specs
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Description official descriptions

In Medal of Honor: Frontline, you play as Lt. Jimmy Patterson, a member of a special forces team.

As a soldier during WW2, you must complete various missions and objectives. You will take part in the D-Day invasion of Normandy, seize the Nijmegen Bridge, infiltrate a weapons facility, sabotage a German U-Boat and more.

You will have access to historically accurate weapons and equipment, such as pistols, rifles, and explosives.

Parts of the game will have you working alongside other soldiers, which adds to the overall experience. Some missions require you to use stealth, where you must pose as a Nazi and show identification without giving yourself away.

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Credits (PlayStation 2 version)

346 People (255 developers, 91 thanks) · View all

Lead Designer
Lead Engineer
Art Director
Lead Animator
Lead Sound Designer
Lead Artist
Lead Character Modeller
AI Lead
Test Lead
Concept Artist
Associate Lead Designer
Producer
Associate Producer
D-Day Producer
Senior Producer
Executive Producer
Development Director
Localisation Producer
Designers
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 83% (based on 35 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.3 out of 5 (based on 80 ratings with 6 reviews)

An emotional, immersive WWII FPS

The Good
A sequel to the PS1 games Medal of Honor and MOH: Underground, the series comes back with a highly immersive, and highly entertaining game which was only surpassed by the PC title Allied Assault before it. This is one of the most immersive, and emotional games I have played, and appeals to both casual gamers, hardcore games, and history buffs alike.

This game is one of the most immersive games I have ever played. From charging the beaches on D-day to fighting alongside allies in a French village, this game will really make you believe that you are in WWII fighting German Nazis. The ambiance is amazing, and with surround sound will blow your mind. Scrupulous attention to small details like Flak cannons in the background, Axis soldiers talking REAL German, and great lighting effects makes you feel in the game. On the D-day mission you will be thrust into battle as machine gun fire rattles around you, and you can see your friends rushing up the beach to confront the enemies. You can hear them shouting orders to each other and screaming for reinforcements. Buildings are done to look like they were personally handcrafted one by one, unlike this games predecessors which were a repetitive mix of the same buildings. The HUD display has been minimized to only health and ammo to provide the best view of the action. You could sit at the game for hours playing missions with your undivided attention, only interrupted by mission briefings and bathroom breaks. Or sleeping. But who does that anymore?

The graphics are on par with its prequel Allied Assault. Great efforts were definitely put into this game, so that you could see all the attention down to the last brick on a building. Character models are done exceedingly well, for both allies and axis. Explosions and smoke effects are the best I've seen on a console. The game suffers from no frame-rate slowdown whatsoever, even in the scenes with immense battles and there are tons of enemies and friendlies fighting on the screen at once. All in all, the graphics of the game definitely worth noting in a game such as this.

The musical score is the best I've heard out of any video game. The scores are varied to be fast-paced for those action-packed moments, and emotional in somber at sad levels. You'll be humming the songs after you shut the game off. Even the main menu music, which is the most amazing music ever composed, draws a tear to your eye when you hear it. The ambiance is done extremely well with authentic machine gun sounds and well done-voice acting.

Even the history buffs, who like to play historically based games will find that the historical accuracy of the game is very high. Most, if not all of the game's events took place in real life, and even the game's main character was a medal of honor recipient. The games cutscenes are not rendered, but instead are something that you would find on the history channel. They are black and white documentations of WWII, with commentary on all of them, providing a entertaining while educational reward.

The guns, while I not say are plenty not rich, are accurate models of real WWII used weapons, like the M1 Garrand, the BAR, and the Thompson machine gun. Both the allies guns and the axis guns can be used, for a bit of variation.

The Bad
The missions are terribly linear for such an immersive game. For the first time in a mission you will piss your pants because the missions are so fun, so detailed, and so immense. However this is not the truth the second time around. A lot of times the levels are made strictly the same every time, down to the gun placement, and most of the time, enemy placement. The first time you will see something cool, and say "Wow, that was pretty cool. Enemies in this game must be pretty smart to do that." Then the second time you see it and say "Oh, hes gonna do that EVERY time. That's sorta stupid." The basic problem is that the game "cheats" to much on the AI, which makes it seem very smart, but in truth it's all prerendered. You will find that the second time around is nowhere near as fun as the first time, and the third time around you will be completely tired of the level. As a result, the game has a pretty bad replay value.

I am completely mad at the AI of the game. Allied Assault had a great AI, so why would the CPU's lose most of their brain power on the console? Allies are sluggish, hiding behind crappy cover and jogging slowly into battle while you are forced to rush into battle and take out the enemies beforehand even before they get there. Enemies are terrible as well. Most will stand there and shoot you, without any attempt to go for cover or evade your gunfire. This lowers the replay value even more.

The controls, as you'd expect from a console are pretty bad. You can spend a while trying to aim at a person and completely miss an entire clip. Movement is fairly smooth, although there tends to be problems when you try to climb up and down ladders

The guns, while I would like to say are interesting, are very few. Even though most guns you can pick up off enemies and use, the same 5 guns are used mostly throughout the game, with weapons like the sniper rifle and the bazooka thrown in during specific missions.

The multiplayer mode is not exactly the greatest in the world. Truly, since all of the levels are designed to be linear, the game looses a lot of its appeal during multiplayer. As well as this, the game has no bots, and is completely boring with only two people. Guns are very limited, and the views are very constricted. Even the GameCube and Xbox versions, which support 4 person multiplayer, aren't all that well with multiplayer, and a 2 player multiplayer isn't all that entertaining either.

The Bottom Line
Medal of Honor is a great game that has appeal to all players. The game should have, and could have, won game of the year for outstanding graphics and sound if it weren't for a crappy AI and the linearity of the levels. The game is not made by its multiplayer, but by its one player mode. Because it is so emotional and immersive, I recommend it to both casual players and hardcore fans of the series alike. Even though it is an old current gen game, it has loss none of its appeal to the newer sub-par sequels. It is one of the two best in the series, only bested by its predecessor, the FPS gaming bliss that is Allied Assault.

PlayStation 2 · by Matt Neuteboom (976) · 2005

Whow, actually a good one in the series.

The Good
I couldn't compare it to the Xbox or GameCube versions, but the graphic in this game is tip-top perfect for such a game. They actually did a really fine Medal of Honor game with no silly things such as undead knights like in Underground, or five bazooka shots to destroy a single Panzer like in Allied Assault. This game has very nice balance in missions, enemies, and objectives, but due to timeline it is set to, it may appear as a bit short in which case you can only impatiently wait for Rising Sun. When I first experienced attention given to Medal of Honor: Underground, I thought w00t, this is incredible. No doubt you'll be even more pleasantly surprised with Medal of Honor: Frontline, from visual achievements to character movements and artificial intelligence of your opponents.

Something which I most appreciate ingame is a dedication to details. That may be just something you can spot in here. For example the way how D-Day mission starts, with all the feeling of a war, bullets flying, explosions randomly shaking grounds, and you panickally trying to reach the trenches for desperate safety. Or when you parachute down in Holland and one of your team members ends up stuck on the windmill, and while calling you for help german sniper mows him down. Or when enemy soldier is near a staircase and you shoot him, he doesn't just fall back down but rolls all the way down with proper thumps and bumps, and that sort of details really add a lot to the atmosphere and a feeling you didn't just throw away your money for something patched up quickly due to former glory of its predecessors.

Weapon arsenal isn't that rich, you you can equally use allied and axis arsenal of weapons making it ad to variety and comparisson. It is really such a pleasure being at the distance and just using your sniper rifle to eliminate the threat, but usually, when you have sniper, so does the Wehrmacht. Aside from variety of enemies and different uniforms, not much of the vehicles are used in the game, except some Panzers and a few trucks and cars here and there. Character physics is nicely recorded and seeing someone running towards you and catching one of your bullets making him fly and roll towards you really makes you just like this game more and more.

Music is extremely well done in this game. The one in MOHU was fine and quite good for PSX, but this one is really creating a great soundtrack, although it doesn't give a feeling like there are more than couple of tracks altogether.

The Bad
Sometimes collision recognition is making some big errors, like when I shoot at enemy soldier who is two steps in front of me, reloading his weapons, and he appears intact. Usually, when enemies are reloading weapons, you can get them just as well as if they're shooting, but guess sometimes an occasional bug like this happens. On the other hand, sometimes these kind of bugs are intentional. For example, you have a clear sniper shot and yet you cannot harm an enemy soldier unless you first activate something that will destroy half of surrounding and then you'll be able to finish what you started. Sort of silly.

Also, one of the msot annoying things in game is allied AI. Your comrades are as stupid as they could possibly be, rushing sometimes ahead, getting surrounded by 3 or 4 enemy soldiers and it's really like extremely annoying seeing them so stupid. More to the fact that they cannot die, and they immediately get up when shot to death. Might be the fact of the easy level, or it just might be the fact to compensate on their incredibly stupid AI, wouldn't know. Also, there were occasional mistakes when some allied soldier surprised me and I blew his head off by a mistake, but guess what... his head was intact, only thing that flew away was his helmet. Tsk tsk tsk....

The Bottom Line
The whole game setting is set in the missions from 1944 ahead, or, from D-Day forward. Missions are extremely well done, very versatile, ranging from extraction to beaches pinned down by german bunkers, running streets of Paris, being onboard german U-Boat, wreaking havoc upon enemy shipyards, shooting on the speeding armored train, stealing prototype aircraft, and more. They are well done, and very interesting, no doubt about it.

This is the first WWII shooter that has none of Id crap such as supernatural something, or monsters just to boost up the atmosphere into imperfection, nope, this is WWII to the finest. And I really can't wait to get my hands on Medal of Honor: Rising Sun. More to the fact I hope there'll be some prerendered cinematics in the game, and not just movies taken from that war. Plus, it does seem tempting to see things up front from the eastern line of war, don't remember if any game had that so far. So, heads up, and hope Rising Sun won't have any supernatural dragons or anything to fight against.

This is a fine game, no silly robot and undead things like MOHU, and no monsterish gibberish like Wolfenstein. It is a World War II and nothing else. Something that should've been made long time ago if it wouldn't be for influence of Id Software which really are incapable of making a good game. hat down for the graphical achievements they accomplish but that doesn't make them good game developers. They should've sticked to making horror gibberish E-movies instead, they're just holding back the whole gaming industry by attracting masses to play such craps. I mean, after seeing the RTCW and how great that game could be if only they didn't add that supernatural crap, man, they have so much potential and they continue to waste it all the time. And not only that, their wasted potential influences other companies to make crappy FPS games. They could've probably done better games than Half-Life or Deus Ex if they set their minds onto it, but no, they just like to stick to "I make crap, and we're proud of it!" phrase. Tsk tsk tsk.... Finally, Frontline is a game that won't give you any craps aside from some minor lacks here and there, it is a game which has begin and an end, and doesn't try to be anything but what we're expecting it to be, a WWII FPS.

PlayStation 2 · by MAT (240759) · 2012

Medal me this

The Good
Your total hero and mine James Patterson makes his return in this game with six missions ablazing. There’s nice World War 2 references to Operation Market Garden and Flying Wing Technology and you’re in the thick of the fighting. Making the fight interesting are machine gun positions you break through and seize, a couple of instances where you go undercover and you get to fight your first ever boss in the series - Sturmgeist. Lastly you’ve got a new welcoming music album from none other than Michael Giacchino. That is all you need to know about the highlights of the game.

The Bad
Graphically the game is hardly any better than the first two PSX entries in the series, with uninteresting, dull colored textures. Frame rate seems to stutter when you fire your automatics full blast or when there’s too much activity going on. Movement is clunky and the camera seems to slide like a remote controlled car, so it doesn’t seem like the perspective of an actual person. Also a sniper scope has a nasty habit of zooming out every time you fire a shot. It’s as if Patterson is stumbling from carrying all those weapons. And speaking of weapons, you don’t really get anything new like the Sauer 38H and Suomi KP/-31, just the usual American and German arms you saw in the last three games.

Presentation has apparently downgraded from the game’s predecessors. The OSS office is just a plain desk with personal items. The mission briefings include lazily used cutscenes ripped straight from the game instead of photos and painted artwork. Also those mission briefings seem to act as it Patterson keeps leaving Germany back to London and then returning to his mission where he left off, which doesn’t make a lot of sense seeing as he’s deep in Nazi-controlled territory, 1000 miles from the British coast.

And what do the six missions throw in your face? Well, the first mission is more or less a repeat of what Mike Powell did in Omaha Beach in Allied Assault. Tight spaces like inside a submarine and small houses make shootouts awkward, due to the slow aiming. Adding to this, the rail shooting parts such as the mine cart ruin the free movement you would be accustomed to.

The Bottom Line
This game doesn’t really live up to its title name. The only frontline proper you ever got was in the first mission. This one should have been called “Medal of Honor: Covert Operations” or something. It’s hardly a match for the Allied Assault series as what it’s got falls below expectations and on a newer console too. It feels like EA got too much inspiration from movies and not enough from real-life events or factual history and wasn’t using the full capabilities of the PS2. Your sole reason to play this one is to play more MOH levels. In the end, it’s just a mediocre midquel to the original PS1 game.

PlayStation 2 · by Kayburt (30392) · 2022

[ View all 6 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
XBOX credits piltdown_man (232926) Mar 23, 2016

Trivia

Enigma machine

During the second mission of chapter two, "Storm in the Port", you are on a German U-Boat and have to steal any information you can and sabotage the boat. However, the level contains a bonus objective that is not told to you by the game. You can find a German Enigma Machine, and by pressing the action button can take the machine's codes and complete the bonus objective, and earn a medal for the action.

The German Enigma coding machine was not fictitious. It was in fact real. The Enigma was an encryption and cipher machine that the Germans used most famously in WWII. The system of encryption for the Enigma was extremely complex, and only through operator error, procedural error, or captured codebooks (a.k.a cipher) could the Allies decipher the messages. As a result, the Enigma's codebooks and secrets were extremely well-guarded. The simple fact that you can walk up to the machine and steal the codebook is questionable in the game, though such a feat certainly would have been awarded.

There is also the matter of historical accuracy. During WWII, only 15 cipher books had been captured, and the Americans and Canadians had one each. The rest were performed by the British. As well, the Naval Enigma cipher was actually captured by a British boarding crew on the U-110, not a single American soldier.

Besides the historical background, the little objective is also a reference to the WWII movie U-571. The plot of the movie details an American naval crew attempting to capture the Naval Enigma cipher aboard the U-Boat U-571. This movie is also just as historically inaccurate as the game, which suggests, perhaps, that it was even the basis for which the objective was based on.

Another funny reference is that in the cheat menu, the typewriter you enter in cheats on is actually the Enigma itself.

German version

In Germany the game had to be pulled from the shelves and all the covers had to be reprinted, because there was a swastika on the back cover and Nazi symbols aren't allowed in (or on) games there. For the same reason all Nazi flags in the game were replaced. Additionally all level statistics (except time and overall evaluation) were removed, the cutscenes using historical film material were re-cut and all words like "Nazi", "Hitler" or "FĂĽhrer" were avoided during localization. A detailed list of changes can be found on schnittberichte.com (German).

Nazis

All of the Nazis speak real German. If you go to the cheat menu, and turn on subtitles, you can see what they say if you sneak up on them unnoticed. Some of the conversations they have are quite humorous, and can be pretty long as well.

References

Several of the chapters in the game are actually modeled off of famous WWII movies and novels.

The first and most obvious one is the "D-Day" mission, modeling its missions, plot, and setting to the movie Saving Private Ryan. Besides the entire plot and completely recreated setting, several elements are borrowed from the movie, including the hopeless abandonment on the beach, the frantic bunker gunfire, shelling, and storming the seawall.

Chapter two, "Storm in the Port" also takes its setting from Saving Private Ryan. The first mission is a reenactment of the climax of the movie, where you must fight through the broken wreckage of a French town to help the Allies in their struggle against advancing Axis soldiers and tanks. The second part of the chapter, storming the German U-Boat pen, also models quite a bit of its scenery and costume design off of cliche German submarine movies.

It makes sense that the game would borrow heavily from Saving Private Ryan; Steven Spielberg directed the movie, and also had a major part in the production of the game.

Another one of these chapters in the game is titled "Several Bridges Too Far". This is an homage to the WWII 1970's book and movie A Bridge Too Far. The plot of the book and movie detailed Operation Market Garden, the failed Allied attempt to break through German lines at Arnhem in the occupied Netherlands.

In an reenactment, the chapter in the game puts you on the front lines of Operation Market Garden. The missions take you through the war-swept city of Arnhem, where you actually rendezvous with the men trapped behind enemy lines in Nazi occupied Netherlands. Throughout the chapter, you even meet most of the characters that are portrayed in the movie.

Information also contributed by Matt Neueboom

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by JPaterson.

GameCube, Xbox added by Kartanym. PlayStation 3 added by MAT.

Additional contributors: MAT, Istari, Indra was here, Jeanne, Patrick Bregger.

Game added June 27, 2002. Last modified February 20, 2024.