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Medal of Honor Allied Assault Spearhead

by Chuck "SmokingCrater" Norton

Article Type: Review
Article Date: December 04, 2002

Product Info

Product Name: Medal of Honor Allied Assault Spearhead
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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MOHAA: The Twelve Step Program

Remember Caddyshack? What a great movie. It is arguably one of the classic golf comedies of all time. (Yeah, yeah. I know it’s a narrow genre, but go with me here.) Okay, now, do you remember Caddyshack 2? No? Well, there is a reason for that. While it still provides a much-needed break from reality, it just wasn’t quite as good as the original. I walked away from that movie with a distinct feeling of indifference. While it wasn’t bad per se, it wasn’t exactly groundbreaking either.

So how on earth does this relate to Medal of Honor Allied Assault Spearhead? (Criminy that’s a mouthful. For the sake of my beleaguered typing fingers, we’ll call it Spearhead. The original Medal of Honor: Allied Assault will be referred to as MOHAA.) Well, MOHAA was an excellent game. Yes, it had its flaws. Predator-like, see-thru-trees-and-walls-and-small-animals-and-such AI soldiers, and sluggish net code served to dissatisfy many gamers. But, there were those out there like myself who quite loved the game. So many a study night sacrificed on the altar of MOHAA that I, and several of my friends, began to call it an addiction. However, I’m happy to say that a few months, one expansion pack, and twelve steps later, I’m doing just fine.

So how does the Spearhead follow-up do in light of its bigger brother? Well, its sort of like Caddyshack 2. (Aaahhh, at last…closure.) Its entertaining for a few hours and it does provide a nice escape from reality, but in all, it’s a take-it-or-leave-it affair. Let’s get down to it.

Getting ready to go.

New Weapons and Cooking With Grenades

Spearhead, a follow-up, add-on (read: YOU NEED MOHAA TO RUN IT) to MOHAA features a host of new weapons, nine new single-player missions, and a variety of multiplayer maps. While little has changed from the American perspective (expect the same weapons as in the original), you now wield weapons ranging from revolvers to Russian PPSh-41 submachine guns. In all the weapon range is pretty good. The faithful M1 Garand remains the only semi-automatic rifle in the game, all others relying on the tried-but-true bolt action. The only other exception being the new German G-43 Sniper rifle. I hesitate to compare it to the M1 because its cyclic time is so much longer, but I suppose by technical terms it still is a semi-automatic weapon.

Another neat feature is that you can cook off grenades, letting the fuse burn before throwing them. If timed correctly, you can explode the grenade over the heads of a group of soldiers and eliminate them en masse. It does require some practice, but it works. Smoke grenades have been included and seem to be effective when used correctly. Though its not recommended to huck a grenade into a room and charge in guns a-blazing. Remember, you’re just as blind as the AI in that situation and they invariably reacquire you faster than you can come to bear on them.

A shot of the Lee Enfield rifle.

White-knuckle Action

The basic premise of Spearhead is a look at several theaters of World War II from the perspective of United States Army paratrooper, Sergeant Jack Barnes. (Gone are the MOHAA days of your cushy, commissioned life as Lieutenant Powell.) The single player (SP) game begins with a C-47 ride into France during the wee hours of June 6, 1944. Just hours before the amphibious landings, thousands of paratroopers dropped into Nazi-occupied France in an attempt to cut off strategic points-of-advance for the inevitable German counterattacks.

View from between the risers as you parachute into Normandy

As Sgt. Barnes, you are one charged with these very tasks. The tension created in this opening scene are paralleled only by your approach to Omaha Beach in MOHAA. The folks at EA succeeded in giving Spearhead’s cutscenes and cinematics a true white-knuckled feeling. As you bail from the transport, thousands of other parachutes flutter down around you amidst jagged lines of tracer fire from German anti-aircraft batteries. After watching two C-47’s collide, a GI falls to his ultimate demise, and crashing through the roof of a French barn, your journey into one of the most chaotic nights of WWII begins.

...and you will know that my name is Jack Barnes when I lay my vengeance down upon thee!

In general, the level design seems pretty solid. The missions are challenging, but not so difficult as to be frustrating. Basically, you are in a fight for your life in the first mission. Like thousands of paratroopers did that night, you struggle to make sense of your surroundings while avoiding that ever-so-unpleasant lethal lead injection. As you fight your way forward, you end up linking up with some British paratroopers and the fight continues. This is a nice feature of Spearhead that I found to be a bit annoying in MOHAA. In the original, it often seemed like it was “World War II: Mike Powell vs. Everybody.”

I Said, "Teamwork!" Dammit!

In Spearhead, I’m happy to say that EA has provided you with quite a few other platoon-mates for support. In fact, many missions require your AI mates to remain alive in order to be successful. Unfortunately, the friendly AI soldiers are little more than target dummies for the marauding German soldiers. In the Ardennes missions, I watched an AI fellow unload an entire clip of Thompson ammo towards a squad of German Landsers (foot soldiers) not more than fifteen yards away. I say “towards” and not “into” because he didn’t hurt a single one of them. They continued running about, gallivanting to and fro amidst the withering fire of my artificial not-so-intelligent (to borrow the phrase from a good friend, Mr. Highman) comrades. That is until I dispatched each of them with a single shot from my Kar98. If you could deliberately wax your AI teammates in Spearhead, believe me, I would have saved a round for each of them. Alas, you can not. At least they serve some purpose though: they tend to draw a little fire away from you…a little.

If only... If. Only.

Anyway, as you progress through the nine SP missions you meet up with more people and in all, you don’t quite get that same feeling of loneliness that MOHAA dished out quite readily. This can be both a godsend and a hindrance. If maybe you’ve spent too much time in front of your computer lately and are in dire need of some social interaction, the AI folks are always there for you. However, sometimes you are responsible for keeping them alive and that’s where things start to get a little hairy. It’s a shame that there’s not a way to actively communicate with the AI. That would’ve made things a bit more manageable. (On that note, a simple “Run, you nimrod,” command would’ve been exquisite.) Often it is difficult enough to keep yourself alive let alone worry about some other of-questionable-will-to-live AI moron.



Loopdy Loo

This leads me to another point. In some cases, objectives are a bit vague. Or, they are obvious, yet quite impossible to achieve. Example: I guess I took a bit too long getting to my dying captain during an artillery barrage in the Ardennes. I’d be running along, minding my own business when all of a sudden I’d get a screen showing some guy I’d never seen before dying. I’d quickload it and again, and the same thing would happen. Repeat ad nauseum. Finally, I put two and two together, restarted the mission and booked over to the captain.

In other places, the game seems to get stuck in a bit of a loop. The first time it happened was when Captain Wilson, a British paratrooper, decides to sally forth and get himself all buggered to bits by a German Tiger. In short, he runs out, takes on a Tiger, “hides” directly in its line of fire, and expects you to shoot it with an 88mm flak gun before it turns him into pudding. (See “Run you nimrod,” paragraph preceding.) That’s all well and good, but the first time I played it, my 88 didn’t do anything to the tank. I repeatedly shot it two and three times and the game refused to give me the kill. So, I’m sorry to say that I watched ol’ Wilson get scrambled Tiger-style more than a few dozen times. Finally, I reloaded the game from a much earlier point, played to the tank scene again and this time it went off without a hitch. Strange.

Sadly, the same thing is happening again where I’m forced to shoot down a Stuka in the Ardennes. I can’t seem to shoot it down at all. No matter how much I hit it, it just doesn’t seem to die. I’ve tried to reload the game from an earlier point, but the nearest point I have saved is quite a ways away and I haven’t played back to the Stuka scene yet. This may very well fix the problem, but it seems a bit annoying. I don’t know if its just my system or what, because a friend reported no problems on his rig, but in short, there are some points where you might become a bit frustrated with the levels and their arbitrary, heavily-scripted nature.


Sorry, No Chaos Here

That’s another issue. The game is Heavily (with a capital H) scripted. This shouldn’t come as any big surprise as MOHAA was the same way. I guess there’s really little other way to approach a game like this (aside from the chaotic, abstract, free-form found in Battlefield 1942) so I can’t really squawk it too bad. But, it does hurt the overall replayability of the single player game. And for an expansion pack that costs $35 US dollars, I’d expect a little more out of the single player game. A coworker reported being done with the game in a mere six hours on the hard difficulty setting. To me, six hours of play time for $35 (that’s $5.83 per gaming hour) seems a bit scant. Sure, they’re a riot the first time around, but the fact is, play the single player maps once and there’s very little to keep you coming back.



Multiplayer

What should keep you coming back to this game is multiplayer (MP). There are a host of new maps included with Spearhead, both Deathmatch (DM) and Objective types. Spearhead even features a new type of multiplayer objective game called Tug of War (TOW), in which the Axis and Allies vie for control of various strategic objectives individual to each map. With the right amount of people in a given map, they can be a whole lot of fun, as each team tries to capture and hold certain objectives. The problem arises in that if you don’t have enough people in a server, the game will (repeat WILL) drag out forever as everyone runs around looking for each other. Why? The maps are huge, that’s why. It's not necessarily a bad thing, it just makes for a very slow game when played with just a few people.

...and this is my BOOMSTICK!

On the other hand, the maps are beautiful and (as stated) very large. So, if you get a fair number of people going in a server, you will have a lot of fun. The level design is very good and there are lots of places to explore and snipe from. You just have to remember to watch your back Also, the designers included a few new weapons to spice things up a bit. In several levels there are such things as player-controllable mortars and the much-feared Nebelwerfer. All this stacks up to one heck of an online gaming experience if you’ve got a good server going.

The only downside of this is that the online maps tend to be resource hogs. It would seem that attempting to run a server from the same machine that you’re playing on is a lesson in futility. With just a few people (less than eight, and most from the LAN) logged into my server, the computer I was using bogged down and everyone’s gaming experience went down the tubes in very short order. Granted, the computer I was using was a bit dated, but it wasn’t that bad and I don’t think it should’ve performed as poorly as it did. Even with the graphics turned down to 640x480x16, it would become a slide show on a regular basis. I guess the long and the short of it is, if you’re looking for a good game, look for, or set up your own dedicated server.



Sights and Sounds

One point of note is that while, as a whole, the game’s sounds are phenomenal, there are a few things that bugged this reviewer. I guess its not an actual complaint, (just an annoyance) but EA decided to rewrite all the voice-overs for MP. All German characters use the same voice, likewise for the other nationalities. For those of you familiar with my MOHAA musical works, you know that I liked to sample the MP sound clips heavily. (Ah, techno…where the worlds of computer nerd and music nerd meet in perfect harmony. Yes…pun intended.) Anyway, it isn’t a big deal, but I will definitely miss the old voice-overs.

Other than the above mentioned niggle, the sights and sounds of Spearhead are right on par with what you’d expect. You quickly come to recognize opponents’ weapons by their sounds (and if you’re a true MOHAA nerd like me, by their reload sounds.) The graphics are quite nice as always and seem very little changed from what we saw in MOHAA. About the only audio squawk I have is with the British Lee Enfield rifle. Every now and then during a firefight, the game won’t play the sound of the gun being fired. Again, not a terribly big deal, but it does detract from the overall experience, so I thought I’d mention it.

One other thing I thought I’d mention is that if you modded your original copy of MOHAA, you might consider uninstalling the entire game and going from scratch. Spearhead behaves rather strangely with many of the mods that I had for MOHAA. Blood mods are particularly bad, but any number of mods stand to give you some strange, not-entirely-expected results.


In the Long Run…

In the end, Spearhead turned out to be a bit of a ho-hum effort on the behalf of EA. It is not a bad piece of software. It is stable and fun, and it delivers exactly what it promises, but it just didn’t promise too much. And for such a steep price, I guess I expected a bit more. In the long run, if I had it to do again, I’d wait until Spearhead’s price tag slipped to about $20 and give it a go.

  • Pros:
        - lots of new weapons
        - fun multiplayer aspect
        - good sounds and graphics

  • Cons:
        - Seriously stupid friendly AI
        - Vague / Unachievable objectives
        - Extremely stupid friendly AI
        - Resource-heavy MP maps
        - Borderline-retarded friendly AI




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