Medal of Honor: Frontline

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.

The Good
+ Customisable controls
+ Excellent presentation
+ Great soundtrack
+ Adequate graphics


The Bad
- Clunky, stiff controls
- Some cryptic mission objectives
- Unstable framerate
- Finicky hit detection


The Bottom Line
Presentation: 90/100
The introduction is excellent, as well as that the first level is a part of D-Day, and can sometimes feel like as if you are part of the battle.

Graphics: 80/100
The graphics are adequate, as well as much of the level designs, but the framerate can sometimes drop if the action gets very hectic.

Audio: 87/100
The gunshots are realistic, and the voice-acting is passable. But what stands out in the sound department is the excellent soundtrack. This game also supports Dolby Surround.

Controls: 55/100
Medal of Honor: Frontline is a decent game, but could've been better if the developers ironed out some control issues. The controls is one of them; while having the ability to customise almost any button is a great idea, but being forced to use an imprecise aiming sensitivity is not, turning and looking can be either too slow or too fast, and also there's no auto-aiming or a sensitivity adjuster to remedy this issue. To add insult to the injury, you have to be pinpoint accurate, and aiming in general is stiff and unfriendly. The controls is a mixed bag with no auto-aiming, and with the imprecise aiming which is compensated by customisable controls.

Difficulty: Easy but technically frustrating
The game on easy is generally very easy, while hard is fairly difficult, especially when you're fidgeting around with the aiming. Getting shot is not as easy to tell as it was in the previous games; in the original Medal of Honor, the screen would violently shake, indicating that you're taking damage, but here, the screen makes a small screen jerk that's almost unnoticeable.

Gameplay: 80/100
The main gameplay is great, but leaves room for improvement. The AI is adequate, the level designs are good, but there are certain issues in gameplay, such as how it's sometime hard to tell if you are taking damage or not. While that there's no blood anywhere in the game, the enemies sure like to put a show to their rather long death animations, but it can turn redundant as some animations can become delayed. The rate of fire for most weapons are reasonable (eg. Colt .45, MP40), but some are questionable (Silenced Pistol).

Overall: 79/100
Medal of Honor: Frontline is a decent game, but its weaknesses, such as the crippled control can affect the gameplay. If you can overlook these flaws, you'll have a lot of fun with the game.

Score: 79/100

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.

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.

The Good
The first time I saw Frontline on a shelf at Blockbuster I was a little curious, after seeing so many articles about the PC versions and the original PSone games, I was intrigued that a newer console version was released. I knew that it wouldn't be as good as the PC version, but still I was pleasantly surprised.

To start of the graphics are phenomenal for that time, even though they are a bit dated now. The tracers from gunfire, the dirt and mud from mortar rounds impacting, grenade blasts, rock chipping around you, it really does convey that you are in a war zone. Also the texturing and the lighting are pretty damn impressive too, even to this day I'm still impressed how well this game looked back then.

The controls take a little bit to get used to, but luckily they are easy to learn and once you get them down pat, it's not a problem. The music is great as well, each level's music fits and certain situations can get your blood pumping.

The choice of weapons really help the game along, from pistols, grenades, machine guns and rifles (my personal favorite is the Springfield 03) and the plentiful ammo and health refills in some of the easier modes can make the game bearable, especially when you are ambushed which happens from time to time.

The variety of levels are a plus too, from storming the beaches of Normandy to a U-Boat even, there's no lack of variety. Two of my favorites is the mission in the Netherlands and the Nijmegen Bridge where the sniper rifle is present. It's really fun to use it and pick off Germans especially the ones running, it's always fun to watch them flip backwards or shooting them off of the Nijmegen Bridge.

In short, this game really does have a lot to offer.

The Bad
Well, a few things did bother me, one was the physics of the NPCs, it's a shame they couldn't incorporate some kind of rag doll effects instead of the preset animations. It's not really a drawback, just a personal preference, however it can be fun too at times, especially if you use the sniper rifle to shoot out an enemies knee having them fall face down and shoot through the top of their head (what can I say, I love to do sadistic things at times). I do wish though that vehicles could have been implemented, you can use fixed machine guns from time to time, but it would have been nice to use a tank, a half-track, shoot from a plane or something. To me that was a major disappointment.

Now the lack of blood doesn't bother me, in fact I think that is what gave the game a kind of charm, the thing that bothered me was the storming of the beaches. Now bear in mind, I know that the technology was a bit limited back then, but I was expecting something along the caliber of Saving Private Ryan with dead bodies strewn across the beach especially after the boat capsizes and you can see men get shot through the water, similar to the movie. Sadly though, you only get a few dead bodies, now true there is a lot of chaos with mortar rounds and machine gun nests bearing down on you which helps it along and distracts you from the lack of bodies.

Also along the lines, the game doesn't have that feel of realism that the modern war games have, instead this one has a pure sense of going commando. Now true some missions you have some help and run with a squad at times, but infiltrating a U-boat in a crate, taking out basically an entire division at a dock, sabotaging a armored train or even breaking into a top secret Nazi facility. This game is a bit more fiction, but still it has it's charm, it just doesn't have that sense of realism storyline-wise that the modern day games have.

The Bottom Line
In the end, Frontlines is still pretty damn impressive to this day, now true compared to the newer games (next-gen not withstanding), especially the Call of Duty games it really doesn't match up that well. Still, Frontlines came along at the perfect time and helped pave the way for the future Medal of Honor and Call of Duty titles on the consoles.

So if you have never experienced this game at least give it a shot, odds are you can find it cheap at any local video store especially now with the declining of the PS2 on the horizon, it'll be pretty cheap, but you will still get your money's worth.

The Good

MOA:F looks, feels, and (especially) sounds like its three predecessors on the PS1 and PC. It's a very well put together game, with solid level design and fairly good graphics (nice explosions). The authentic WWII sound effects add a lot of ambiance to the game.

The missions are well paced, and your objectives are generally clear; you don't spend a lot of time wandering around confused, wondering where to go next. There is a very helpful feature that allows you to access hints about your current objectives by pressing the 'Select' button. This doubtlessly saved me a few hours of wandering around in frustration on some levels.

**The Bad**

This is NOT the PC 'Medal of Honor: Allied Assault', nor is it even really the original PS1 MOH games. The controls are absolutely awful, almost to the point of making the game completely unplayable. There are numerous different control schemes to choose from, and even an option to customize the controls to your liking. This is all for not, however, as the aiming is always imprecise and sluggish, regardless of what controller setup you choose. There is no way to adjust the sensitivity of your aiming mechanism, and it is consistently difficult to aim at even the closest of targets. Many times did I unload a whole clip at a Nazi at point-blank range, only to miss and miss and miss due to poor control. The targeting reticle moves around too quickly and sloppily, except when in sniper mode, in which case it moves painfully slowly.

The graphics, while nice, aren't anything to write home about. The AI, both enemy and friendly, is spotty. Your squadmates will often lag behind and stand around while you move forward into combat. Nazis often just stand there and let you shoot them again and again, without running or taking cover.

There is no in-mission save, which inevitably leads to the unwanted repetition of boring and tedious sections of the game. Multiplayer in previous MOH games has always been every shade of boring, and it was wisely left out this time.

**The Bottom Line**

I have yet to play a truly good FPS for the PS2, and this one certainly breaks no new ground. While MOH:F has a lot of flaws, it will probably scratch the itch of gamers who don't have a PC or an Xbox, the platforms where the quality FPSs seem to all be landing lately. Rent it first though, because the controls really ARE that bad.