A botched landing at best

Let me start off by saying that I love playing first person shooter games. Of the most recent FPS games, I have beaten Halo 3, Call of Duty 4, and Rainbow Six Vegas 2 all on their respective hardest difficulties so I would consider myself a seasoned player.

Medal of Honor Airborne for the Xbox 360 did not stand out to me as a great or even good World War II shooting game. The only memorable thing about it was the ability to jump out of an aircraft and land anywhere on the battlefield.

When you first start in campaign mode, you go through a basic parachuting tutorial. You learn how to turn, fall faster/slower, and achieve a flared landing in which you waste no time pulling out your weapon. Unfortunately, achieving a flared landing is easier said than done. Extremely easier said than done. In fact, it is very rare and difficult to get a flared landing and seems more up to chance if you will achieve one or not. This gives the player little choice of whether or not you should land behind enemy lines. When you more than likely botch your landing, you will be killed before you even get the chance to pull out your weapon.

As I usually do, I began playing through the campaign for the first time on the easy difficulty to get a feel for the controls and levels. I was instantly unimpressed. You must wait through the long loading time to be seated in a briefing room where you are told the mission objectives and are shown an easily forgettable map of safe landing zones. Nothing redeeming comes from this briefing as the objectives are displayed multiple times during the level and are displayed on the pause menu. Also, the map you are shown looks very unalike to the one you play on so attempting to memorize areas goes for naught.
After the briefing, you must wait through another ridiculously long loading time to reach the map. You begin on the airplane and jump when told. With that, you are instantly thrown into the action. As is typical with FPS games, you complete objectives, kill baddies along the way, and repeat.

Each battle you participate in is based off of real battles fought in Europe during WWII, however the story of what is occurring is generally unclear. The biggest issue I had with the story during gameplay was that you are ranked as a Private, yet nearly everyone on the battlefield follows your orders. Also, you alone must complete each and every objective. This alone is extremely unrealistic, but I can let a bad story slide if the gameplay is decent.

Unfortunately, the gameplay is not decent. I found myself more than often wishing to die so I could jump out of the aircraft again and go somewhere else. When aiming your gun, you must look down the barrel of the gun to shoot. There are no crosshairs. As if this and moving targets wasn't difficult enough, the barrel is constantly moving as if your arms are shaking while trying to line up a shot. The AI on both sides is completely worthless. Although your teammates can help you out, the generally just follow you and shoot in the general direction of the enemies and don't even bother taking cover. They don't even take cover from when the tanks arrive. The enemy AI takes cover, but shoots only at you if they see you. Also, the enemies seem to have extremely accurate aim and make it nearly impossible to take on more than two at a time.

Each level consists of five main objectives which are then followed by two or three additional objectives. You reach a checkpoint after each completed objective. More than often, you will kill many enemies and come close to completing a new objective and then die. Not only is this frustrating, but you then start off from the last objective completed. This happens countless times throughout each level and after the five main objectives are completed, you can no longer parachute after dying. You simply respawn at the last checkpoint near a bunch of allies.

Keep in mind that all of this is occurring on the easy difficulty. I tried this game on normal difficulty upon completion of the easy difficulty. Somehow I made it to the last level where I eventually gave up. Too much occurs between the checkpoints that it just becomes too frustrating to continue playing. Also, the campaign is extremely short. I finished it an around five and a half hours.

The visuals in the game are downright embarrassing. They would barely have passed on the Xbox and Playstation 2 let alone on the Xbox 360. The characters are blocky, the maps are small, and when too many things appear on the screen, everything starts to lag. As opposed to the open map feel from Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4, I could not help but feel trapped in a claustrophobic cluster of buildings.

The one aspect I was most annoyed with was the explosions. Everyone knows that hiding behind a wall from a grenade most often will do nothing to save you. Everyone, save the developers. If you see that a grenade has been thrown towards you, you merely need to move behind a wall to receive absolutely no damage from it. This wall can be anything from a small rock wall that you crouch behind to a wooden wall of a building. As if this was not bad enough, you can do the same thing to avoid being blown up by a tank. Really now, since when could any wooden wall withstand being fired upon by a tank, let alone allow someone hiding behind it to walk away unscathed?

The multiplayer is also something not to be excited about. The local multiplayer only includes a few maps and does not have any AI support. Online multiplayer is just flat out horrendous. I had to wait about five minutes to locate a match and once the game had started, it was so laggy that I could not even move. After attempting to play online multiple times without much improvement, I eventually gave up.

The one good thing that I enjoyed about this game is the weapon upgrade system. After a certain amount of kills with a weapon, it becomes upgraded, giving you more stable aiming, increased accuracy, increased magazine size, etc. It was fun trying to upgrade as much as possible with as many weapons as possible, but it was very difficult to do so after losing all progress through constant deaths.

Overall I would say completely ignore this game. Unless you enjoy jumping out of planes and landing in more than just a little frustration, avoid this.