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Medal of Honor: Allied Assault

by Joe "Impaler" Highman

Article Type: Review
Article Date: February 11, 2002

Product Info

Product Name: Medal of Honor: Allied Assualt
Category: WWII First Person Shooter
Developer: 2015
Publiser: EA Games
Release Date: Released
Min. Spec: Win 95/98/2000/Me/XP (NT not supported); PII 450 or equiv.; 128MB RAM; 16MB OpenGL capable video card; DirectX 8.0 comp. sound
Rec. Spec: PIII 700 or equiv; 32MB OpenGL video
Multiplayer: TCP/IP Internet and LAN
Files & Links: Click Here

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A Day of Decision

58 years ago this summer, young men from the United States, Great Britain, and Canada mounted among the most massive amphibious operations in the history of warfare. The fighting soldiers set off one early June morning in 1944 over rough seas and under inclement weather to begin the invasion of Hitler's Fortress Europe and the Atlantic wall. Waiting for them stood three battalions of veteran and determined infantry in well-established defensive positions designed by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, one of history's most prominent and effective generals, and among Hitler's most trusted and dependable leaders.

The morning was June 6, 1944 and the target was Normandy, France. The United States attacked positions along beaches code-named Utah and Omaha. Bloody Omaha was the largest of the assault beaches and spanned almost 6 miles from end to end. When the afternoon sky looked upon the carnage, some 2,400 American troops, many seeing their first tastes of combat, lay dead.

Bloody Omaha Beach and its formidable defenses

In 1998, Academy award winning director Steven Spielberg staggered film audiences with Saving Private Ryan, the unforgettable motion picture that introduced a new sense of the brutality and savagery of war to a generation of the world who largely regarded war as a push-button, detached experience. Nobody who sat through the films opening invasion sequence will ever forget the astounding ferocity of the moment.

Shortly following the effort, Spielberg commented that he wanted “to play the game” version of his movie. Sadly, no such title existed, so with the expert assistance of Captain Dale Dye, USMC Ret, and his wealth of knowledge of the weapons and tactics of the era, DreamWorks Interactive, now known as EALA, set about creating a first person shooter to fill the void left for a World War II-era action game. The result was the critically celebrated and acclaimed Medal of Honor for the Sony Playstation gaming console. PC Gamers clamored for a 32-bit version of the title for their own gaming needs, and the call was soon answered.

Captain Dale Dye, USMC Ret, seen here with Tom Hanks on the set of Saving Private Ryan

EA Games and 2015, Inc. present Medal of Honor: Allied Assault for the Windows-based personal computer. The title places one man in harm's way over a course of six challenging campaigns, ranging from the windswept desert cliffs of Algeria all the way into the snow-covered heart of the Rhine. Hundreds of skilled and aggressive enemy soldiers, officers, guard dogs, machinists, scientists, and snipers stand in your way towards final victory. To succeed, you will need to combine deadly accuracy with your weapons with a prudence of knowing when to fight and when to use stealth. Or, if all else fails, steal a 100-ton King Tiger armored behemoth and raze enemy resistance to cinders.

The title offers more than thirty extensive levels of single player gaming opportunity that can easily steal several hours of sleep. A multiplayer capability is included for two to sixty-four players with a host of server-configurable options.

Into the Breach!

The third mission of the six mission series places the player squarely in a Higgins boat, the American landing craft that carried men into the breach at Utah and Omaha beaches. For fans of Saving Private Ryan, the mission is largely reminiscent. Following briefing, the player is treated to just over eighty seconds of cinematic action from within the landing craft. Shells tear the sky overhead as shore based artillery rains down around the incoming invaders. Large swells gush from impacts and the resulting mist is so well rendered visually and the sound so rich as to dazzle even the sternest critics.

Other young soldiers in your party fill the atmosphere with a mix of mumbled prayers, excited chatter and uncensored seasickness. The words erupt from the Navy man at the helm “Clear the Ramp! 30 seconds!” almost exactly as from the movie. Your captain barks the orders instructing the men along the left side of the ship to follow your lead, while the right will follow him. The horrendous shelling intensifies as the approach nears its end and another craft takes a direct hit, showering the air with debris, young men and epithets. Did I mention that all this is before the game play gets under way?

The invasion begins

The ramp drops, and if you saw the movie, you know what follows: murderous and unrelenting machine gun fire from seemingly every direction shreds and tears into the men in your platoon and the AI soldiers hitting the sand from other craft. Bullets whisk past and heavy mortar rounds pound nearby, scattering troops and sending sand hissing into the air. The relative safety of the seawall seems miles away and the pitiless German soldiers manning the MG42 machine guns have no intent on letting you reach that haven.

There are no atheists in foxholes

For a while, it is easy to forget that you are playing a game and one may find oneself crouched behind the seawall taking in the sights and sounds. Medal of Honor: Allied Assault certainly excels in both departments. In this scene and the others that follow, the player is treated to a spectacle of sight and sound. Players near the low end of the hardware requirements will curse their luck and wish they had larger more powerful systems. Thankfully, each of the visual and audio options are adjustable for performance boons at the expense of effect.



Graphics and Motion

Some of the visual effects include fully rendered volumetric smoke and fog, complex shadows, bullet holes and scorching marks on walls, and a detailed weather generation system. The visual effects also feature dynamic lighting of explosions, searchlights, and muzzle flashes from weapons; meanwhile the in-game characters are depicted in stunning detail, including authentic uniforms, smooth skeletal animation, and fully illuminated modeling.

A large and often overlooked element in character design is motion. No matter how photo-realistic an image is, if that image isn’t properly and realistically animated, or if its behavior simply doesn’t fit, then the audience will refuse to be taken in by it. Medal of Honor: Allied Assault scores favorably here.

Enemy troops can move with a wide range of motion, including the crisp lines of a highly trained SS troop, the arrogant swagger of the officers, or the utter boredom of a lone sentry patrolling a rainy watch along a remote fence line. Both enemy and AI allied characters will take full advantage of the terrain behind which they are attacking, such as going prone to increase accuracy and decrease their likelihood of taking damage, flipping tables and firing from behind, or blind firing by sticking their weapon around a corner and simply spraying the air in hopes of scoring hits.

AI units will also run away screaming with their arms flailing madly when a grenade is tossed nearby, or in some cases, they will throw their body on top of the explosive and “take one for the team.” Even wounded characters are well rendered. Strike an enemy soldier in the abdomen, and he will double over; strike him in the head and the head and neck will snap sharply back. Or, as has become my favorite, strike the legs and watch as the wounded man limps along his course, still determined as ever to separate your virtual soul from your mortal coil. Fans of the red stuff will feel left out of this one, as gore is not modeled.

Chest Cabbage

Aural Environment

For all the richness of the visual presentation, the game's most winning feature is its amazing sound and audio effects. Fully configurable like its visual cousin, the audio feature allows support for all manner of output, from headphones to surround sound systems. If you do not yet own a 5.1 Surround system complete with powered subwoofer, you will find yourself wanting one as soon as possible.

The weapons sound effects are crisp and authentic to the weapon. Sniper rifles have the distinctive crack of a load of powder propel a relatively small projectile, while the heavier .45 Caliber slugs of the Thompson submachine gun have a throaty resonance all their own. Rounds tear into enemy flesh with a distinctive energy and a shell to the sternum or skull has an unmistakable “thud” that a softer tissue area does not.

Among my favorite sound details is the fully conversational German spoken by and among the German troops in the game. While I do not speak the language and cannot be a true judge of its proper meaning, I nevertheless found the dialog a refreshing and engrossing aspect of the game play. Few things bother me more than watching an old war movie and the German soldiers speak entirely in English even among themselves, but yet still speak with that hackneyed accent!



Level Design

The level design is well thought out and richly detailed. One never quite knows which twists and turns along the way might be greeted with a hail of MP40 fire or the sudden silence that only a sniper’s well aimed round can bring. Players will be best served by an appreciation of cover and concealment and using defilade to prevent unwelcome fire, as well as taking advantage of enfilade firing into the sides of a defended position rather than brashly engaging head on. The landscapes have a European feel to them, especially some of the levels set in Normandy and Brittany, France.

Before the campaign gets firmly under way, there is an excellent “Basic Training” mission narrated and directed by Captain Dale Dye, a real treat for those of us who are among his fans. He has an almost perfect voice for military commands over a radio, with his Missouri Midwestern accent shining through boyishly.

All of these excellent visuals, amazing sound effects, articulate actors and intricate level designs might make for a wonderful film in and of its own right. If this were a movie review, I would have plenty to praise and laud. However, this is a game review, and here is where this otherwise outstanding title really begins to lose precious ground, and quickly!

Counter-Offensive

I was 15 seconds into the first engagement of the first mission when I noted two of the larger flaws that plague this game throughout! The first is remarkably poor damage modeling, and the second is a decided lack of ratio between when an enemy can see and hit you and when that same enemy is visible.

The M1 Garand is chambered to fire a 150 to 180 grain 30.06 round. This is the same round used to bring down deer from great range and is nearly enough to bring down a moose or a bear! The rifle was deadly accurate in the hands of most infantrymen at 100 feet, while others could of course fare better.

The first Afrika Corps soldier that I lined up in the crosshairs was destined for a bad day. I squeezed off the first shot and his body twisted and his weapon fell to his side. The words of a police officer friend of mine rang in my head, “If he’s good enough to shoot once, he’s good enough to empty a clip in him.” I put seven more rounds into the man before the clip ejected with an unmistakable PING sound that nearly made me drool. However, as I was reloading a fresh magazine into the rifle, the enemy soldier recovered his composure and returned fire at me! I know what you are thinking, that I must have missed him or otherwise winged him, but I aim center mass and was no more than 15 paces away. He absorbed eight 30.06 rounds.

Another excellent example of this came during a time in the bocages of Normandy, France. A lone patrolling Wehrmacht trooper came around a corner nonchalantly. Sadly, I happened to be standing there with thirty rounds of 45-caliber ammo loaded in a Thompson submachine gun. I put three rounds into his midsection. He bent over from the impact, but did not drop. I put two rounds into his left thigh, the second round nearly hitting the hip from the initial recoil. He did not drop. I put two rounds into his right thigh, this time starting lower and keeping the rounds in the thigh. He did not drop. I put two more into his groin and lower abdomen. He did not drop. I put two more in his sternum. He did not drop. Nearly 10 seconds had passed and he withstood 11 rounds before I impatiently drew the Colt 45 automatic pistol and fired three times into his head. He dropped.

One good thing that could be said about this phenomenon is that this is the first game I have played where the damage modeling didn’t simply allow me to put a heavy enough round into an exposed body part and score a kill via the mathematics of damage to target health. In some other titles, and some very good ones I might add, two or three well aimed sniper rounds to a hand or a lower leg can kill the bad guy. This may not be at all realistic, although it would ruin his whole day.

The second major complaint for the single player function is in the ability of the enemy to spot, locate, target, and hit your player without being visible. And I don’t mean concealed, I mean not even being drawn on the screen yet or while only a small portion of his body is visible around a corner or bluff. Nazi sharpshooters managed hits against me that would make the Warren Commission incredulous. I took hits from bad guys behind walls, fences and who were so far out of visual range that even with a sniper scope, all that could be seen was a light gray outline in the mist and a distinct muzzle flash as incoming rounds tore into my uniform. This problem is so epidemic on some maps that if it weren’t for the quick save and quick restore feature, I doubt I would have been able to get through the mission. I am all for a fair fight, but the credibility of the contest really falls under the microscope in this case.

Thus, the game soon boiled down into little more than a “mow-them-down-with-everything-you-have-even-if-you-have-to-fire-into-the-night” situation and far less of the simulation of squad-based infantry combat that modern players crave and demand. As an alternative to shooting, enemy troops may also employ the butts of their rifles to beat your player senseless in close range combat. For whatever reason, this function is only available to the human player while using the pistol. Other weapons may not be used in this secondary fashion; a decided disadvantage in case you run out of ammo but might be otherwise close enough to finish off a bad guy or otherwise prevent him from shooting you with impunity as a fresh magazine is brought to bear.

This havoc-based strategy permeates the multiplayer component of the game as well. Sadly, the multiplayer almost feels like an afterthought and offers nothing new, innovative, or original to the long-time player of online FPS titles. There are no player classes with individual functionality and there is no reward for team-based play. Even objective based missions, in which the Allied team must take an objective while the Axis team defends it quickly disintegrate into a contest of who can spray machine gun rounds the fastest. Although all titles have “spawn-campers”, they were almost epidemic on the majority of the private and the GameSpy servers I encountered.

All dressed up and nowhere to go

And speaking of GameSpy, don’t even attempt to play the multiplayer game without downloading the 15MB patch for multiplayer woes. Bugs abound, and even the highly touted integrated Internet game browser offers none of the filtering and customization that other titles have been using since the nineties. The title lacks any AI bots against which to stage an “Us versus Them” contest with human players working together against an AI enemy and is instead a solely human versus human endeavor.

The single player ending sequence following the successful destruction of a Nazi mustard gas production facility and subsequent escape through a blockade of Wehrmacht soldiers struck me as more of an afterthought than even did the multiplayer! After hours of unrelenting battle (I even wore out my mouse and had to get a new one) and after careful planning and attempted use of tactics, the last two minutes of the game felt like taking one’s own sister to the prom. Sure, you went through all that fuss and got all prettied up, but there really wasn’t much point. Even the final voice-over reflected this sentiment. In the face of an exploding and burning complex, a lone soldier from your attached (and quite worthless) Ranger platoon says, “Well, will you look at that.” That’s it. Roll credits.

Armistice Day

Sadly, my conclusion must be that the cons simply outweigh the pros. The visuals are stunning, but sadly do not offer anything new to the FPS fan. The audio effects are without compare and are a good argument in and of themselves to invest in a good surround sound gaming setup. The authors genuinely care about preserving the authenticity of the era and of the mood, and there is a real sense of the complexity of the planning through out the game. This, however, is simply not enough to compensate for the horrifyingly bad damage model, lack of genuine fairness of the contest, and all but non-existent multiplayer.

If you are looking for an excellent single player experience, there are better titles out there. If you are looking for an outstanding multiplayer experience, this title just simply is not it. If you want a lot of replay for your buck, this one falls short.

On the other hand, if you don't mind a compromise between playability, eye candy, and are willing to sacrifice any meaningful strategy, especially in multiplayer, you would do well to consider this title. Just don’t expect the best action game of your life.



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