Honour your dead. Then be glad this is only a game - for you.....

Medal Of Honour : Frontline is a great game that, I think, should be part of the school curriculum for history teachers the world over. It's all very well showing the kids text books and explaining to them what happened in WWII, but if you can sit them in front of a 60 inch TV with a controller and tell them to try and make it up Omaha beach without once being shot, I reckon it would do a lot more to educate them.

MOHF is the sequel to the massive Medal Of Honour : Allied Assault on the PC. Fortunately, the programmers have not duplicated it on the PSX2, rather they've made you a different person in the same war. MOHF only has one element in common with MOHAA, and that's the allied landings in Normandy - D-Day. Given the limitations of a PSX2 versus a full-on PC, the programmers have taken full advantage of everything the PSX2 has to offer, and done a bloody good job of it.

If you've seen Saving Private Ryan, the opening scene in MOHF will seem strangely familiar. You start off in a landing craft, heaving across the waves towards the shore, under the protection of sea-launched artillery. MOHF is played entirely from your point of view - it's a first-person shooter. Look around the landing craft and you'll see other soldiers being sick, crying, asking why they're there. The captain is barking orders from the front, the allied aircraft are streaking overhead, and body parts are littering the water from the landing craft that just got blown to pieces next to you. *Blam* - a huge explosion and you're blown into the water. There's a couple of seconds of serenity as you float back into conciousness underwater. Bullets streak past you leaving trails of bubbles. You surface and are instantly under fire from 4 machine gunners in two hardened bunkers, and tens of german troops on the sand dunes. You're in the wide open, with only anti-tank defences to hide behind on the beach. Bodies litter the waters edge. You see a medic pumping the chest of a downed colleague. You see other guys jittering behind the anti-tank defences, shell-shocked. And amidst all this carnage, you are expected to run up the beach, blow a hole in the barricades, run the minefield and storm the bunker. If you're unlucky, now you know why your grandfather died in the D-Day landings. Yes - MOHF is that good.

The graphics in MOHF are staggeringly good. Every soldier is fully modelled, fully articulated, fully texture mapped. The mouths move in-synch when they speak to you. The clothes crease in the right way when they run. Light-sources flicker and illuminate dark passageways extremely well. Special effects when the 12 inch artillery rounds land next to you on the beach blow huge amounts of sand into the air and leave gaping, sooty craters, smouldering gently. As you storm a bunker, artillery continues to land outside, shaking the ground and dislodging dust inside the bunker with you. It really gives you the sense of wondering if the whole thing is going to collapse with you in it. Each weapon is intricately modelled so that as you re-load, you can see the magazine being clipped in. Trees wave in the breeze. Fires burn, smoke rises, windmills spin idly. The framerate can take a bit of a beating in some places, but its forgiveable in MOHF.

The sound is awesome. My recommendation is to hook up your PSX2 to your hifi and add a little bit of bass. When you're picking your way through the Dutch farmlands, you'll be able to hear the constant ack-ack-ack-ack of rifle fire in the distance. When you find the ladder and get up to the top of the bridge in Nijmegen to snipe the enemy, the wind howls past you. When you're hiding in the bushes and tanks roll past, you can hear the squeal of the badly-maintained wheel bearings. Most amazing of all, when the aircraft fly overhead, you can tell if it's a Spitfire because the programmers even seem to have perfectly duplicated the sound of a Rolls Royce Merlin engine. And through all this, you'll hear the german infantry constantly barking warnings at each other, and similarly, the American GIs will be shouting for cover, or indicating where they've found a target. At one point you end up in a mansion owned by some kraut with a clock fetish - it sounds like the doc's lab in the opening scene of Back To The Future part 1. :-)

Gameplay is a bit of an oddity in MOHF. Well - not so much gameplay, as controls. There are several predermined control mechanisms for you to choose from and it took me an hour to find which one worked best for me. The first day I played, I was forever looking up and down when I meant to be running forwards or backwards, but then I think my brain must have programmed my thumbs whilst I was asleep, because on day 2 of playing, I was using the control system as if it was the most natural setup in the world. With the variety of actions and weapons available, every single button and control on the PSX2 controllers is used, even the L3 and R3 buttons (when you press the analogue sticks down). First time I've seen that!

MOHF takes you from the D-Day landings, on to some stealth missions, and some rescue missions. I grew up in Holland as a child, so it was a little unnerving when I got on to the missions in Holland. I can't say I recognised the places, but the style of the modelling and texture work was bang-on accurate, so I can only assume the rest of the locations in the game are equally well done. My favourite mission to date is the Nijmegen bridge. The modelling in this area is just amazing. It doesn't look like a videogame bridge - it looks like the real thing complete with all the rivets and rust.

You'll get hours of gameplay out of MOHF, and my recommendation is that you play the Omaha beach scene every 11th of November out of respect for the people who died to end the war. It's more fun than sitting at home, or walking around a graveyard, and it just might serve to remind us all why we should do everything possible to stop another worldwide war. Sure it's only a game - but is it....?