Warfighter is a new sequel to the First Person Shooter Medal Of Honor. You play as Preacher a Tier One Solider in the Middle East as he shoots his way through a number of missions to hunt down a terrorist leader only known as “the Cleric” and stop him from distributing a new explosive called PETN 

Medal of Honor saw its reboot back in 2010, while the game was a huge let down of the original series, EA promised that this sequel would change the game as we know it. Correcting everything that went wrong in the reboot and fixing it in new and improved ways, they said that the game would be as true to the experience that you can get.  

They lied. After finishing the main campaign missions, I can say that the game itself feels unfinished, at times dropping frame rates and having massive glitches in characters and the environment. While the game overall looks beautiful, stunning even, the graphics lack the simple fixes that with time could have been perfected. Developer ‘Danger Close’ doesn’t seem to have had the man power to rush out a game complete in such a small time frame. That said on the scale of things that’s not the game’s biggest problem.

EA is struggling to keep up with near perfect games like Activision’s Black Ops and Modern Warfare and rushing games out before their opponents release isn’t the answer. The main campaign lacks a great plot and character development, often switching between its main protagonist “Preacher” for other marines we know nothing about and asking us to feel something for them if one dies. Without the character development these emotional scenes just fail to grasp that tear from my dry eyes. 

Gameplay

Gameplay is somewhat amusing until you begin to realise that the AI is fairly useless at shooting, you can hide behind any object and just peak out and cap off any head that’s in your way. With hundreds of head shots under your belt other things in the single player campaign begin to appear to be repetitive. Breaching (breaking into rooms with style) is well over used throughout the game, so much so, if you made a drinking game out of it you would be in hospital by the second act. Warfighter knows very well that breaching is over used that they offer up a number of ways to complete the breach, but the slight variations just end up in the same slow-mo shooting spree that follows.

The game is full of different level styles, car chases, to foot chases, to boat chases to a stealth mission and back to foot chases again, so many foot chases even my feet hurt yet my arse hasn’t been off the couch all day. The unoriginal level design and story have been done so many times before in way better games like Modern Warfare 3 or Battlefield 3 even Duke Nukem Forever had more original scenes then this.  One thing I did enjoy is that with sniping, its a lot more realistic (and I say realistic but in reality I have never shot a scoped rifle, but I could imagine) wind and distance are taken into account so straight shooting someone in the face become quiet difficult the further away you are. 

You can still have fun in Warfighter, the gunplay, action and picking off those terrorist thugs with a swift bullet to the face is still as amusing as it’s ever been but with the lack of a great story and new original ideas the game falls flat.  

Audio 

The games soundtrack is composed by Ramin Djawadi, and is by far one of the best things that Warfighter has going for it. The score is perfectly intertwined throughout the gameplay and sets the tone of the war nicely, notably 2 of the soundtrack’s songs are composed my Mike Shinoda from Linkin Park. The sound effects are something that Warfighter gets right. The guns shoot like should, grenades sound as if they are exploding right in your ear and just as well too, if it’s something that a war game can’t get wrong it’s the sound.   

Controls  

Controls here are what you would expect from a shooter, simple and sweet. Everything is easy to do if you have played a similar game like Call of Duty or Battlefield. For the newcomers there is a brief tutorial at the beginning of the game to help you sort yourself out. However if this is the first FPS you are picking up, just put it back down and rethink your life. 

Multiplayer 

Most of the recent FPS games are made mostly for their Multiplayer aspects. Warfighter is no different, while it’s definitely not the best multiplayer experience on the platform, it’s the best thing that Medal of Honor: Warfighter has going for it… but is that really saying anything.

Here you’ll find the standard game modes that you’ll find anywhere including Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the flag to name a few but if you actually want to play against people you’re better off just sticking to Team Deathmatch as the users playing on the servers in the other modes are either lacking or switching out after waiting too long for other players. 

Team Deathmatch is something that you can pick up and play anytime, but for those who love to unlock everything they can complete all the achievements and receive all the perks. Danger Close has pulled all the stops in perfecting their skill trees and perks based system allowing players to make the perfect load out of weapons and kill streaks.  With over a massive 60 different guns the game has to offer there is an unlimited amount of ways to fight. 

But something that bothered me with the multiplayer was that the guns lacked the magnitude of power they had with the single player campaigns. Back there I was blowing off heads left right and centre but here the guns would only do a quarter of the damage. With that in mind it changed the way I was playing, from run and duck, to run and just open fire. 

Final Level 

With a little more time in the developing stage Medal of Honor: Warfighter could had been something that EA had hoped for, but with the fast turnaround times they expect, the game just failed for the most part. While it’s not Thor: God of Thunder (the worst game I have ever played) it just doesn’t live up to other games in the same genre. So if you are reading this and already picked this up in hopes for an immersive fps I’m sure you won’t hate it but if you are thinking about getting it, I would just wait for Black Ops 2.