Medal of Honor: Rising Sun

The Good
The new theme and setting of the game comes in as quite a surprise as you're plunged straight into a fire fight in the first mission. The game certainly tests your alertness and calibre with a fair amount of hazards, tanks, snipers and soldiers hidden in spider holes. The secrets and hidden objectives in the missions are intriguing enough to hunt for and do give the missions some replay value. Some of the rewards such as the Letters from Home give some personality to the game. I was amazed to find that they featured a real person in the game - Martin Clemens.

It comes as a change that takes getting used to, to find that you're playing nine long missions instead of the usual six or seven divided into three parts, but the generous number of save points make it worth that change. Weapons come as an interesting variety in most missions (although there is no Arisaka you can wield), although it's nice that there is a button to throw grenades instead of switching to them. While Michael Giacchino's composition is absent from the game, Christopher Lennertz offers very fitting and thrilling music tracks that change as the situation does in a mission.

The Bad
In some missions there are not a lot of weapons to work with. Sometimes you'll be stuck with only a machine gun with terrible recoil and your chances of getting 100% accuracy are impossible, you're better off sticking to mounted machine guns whenever possible. You're not going to get reliable help from any of your allies during the gameplay, the non-plot relevant ones such as the Chindits will die as quickly as they join up, so you're better off fighting alone anyway.

The controls are awkward to work with and the movement isn't as smooth as the PlayStation 1 Medal of Honor games, which makes sniping particularly difficult. Often you'll find yourself getting shot first, before you can make your crack shot, it's a like mongoose vs. snake game. The rail-shooting scenes, like the boat and the elephant, reduce your control and cover even more.

The Bottom Line
The developers took a significant step going from the European to the Pacific Theater of WW2. It's obvious that they were trying a new formula. Unfortunately that formula sours quickly after one or two playthroughs. You don't have to have Colonel Hargrove, Manon Batiste or any of the likeable characters to make a good game, but you really need to balance the pacing and make at least four different weapon types available at all times to balance the abundance of automatic weapons. Undoubtedly the failure of this game led to the cancellation of its sequel, but it wouldn't be many years before EA fixed its mistakes with the release of Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault, so I would say they made a supreme effort in this title.