‘Honor’ restored - Military Video Games, computer games, games, gaming - Navy Times

‘Honor’ restored

The designers of the new “Medal of Honor” set out with a simple goal: To invigorate a middling first-person shooter franchise that has been just all right for almost all of its 11-year history — nowhere near the standout that “Call of Duty” has become, but also not the waste of electrons known as “Brothers In Arms.”

I’m pleased to report that the operation was a success, and the new game, called simply “Medal of Honor,” is indeed the best yet.

It’s no “Halo: Reach” or “Modern Warfare 2,” but it’s a thousand percent better than the last title in the series I played, 2007’s “Medal of Honor: Vanguard,” dispensing with the tired World War II motif in favor of a highly realistic take on the war in Afghanistan.

The game’s commitment to realism drew some silly controversy this summer — more on that later — but it paid off, and players will appreciate the spot-on dialogue, excellent sound design and frequently beautiful graphics. The visuals throughout the game are stunning.

You play as a “Tier 1 operator” from a Delta Force or Navy SEAL team and also as an Army Ranger during the early days of the Afghanistan invasion, making in-person deliveries of American lead to villains who sorely deserve it.

None of today’s use-of-force debates or “hearts and minds” counterinsurgency buzzwords appear — this is straight-up ass kickery, ventilating bad guys and calling in wrath from the heavens-style airstrikes.

“Medal of Honor” improves the series’ writing and character creation exponentially: Your Delta, SEAL and Ranger squad-mates are actually enjoyable to spend time with — the bushy-bearded Delta operator Dusty steals the show — as opposed to the wooden “Saving Private Ryan” rip-offs you used to get.

The game also includes enough noninfantry combat — including the chance to snipe at long range with a .50-caliber Barrett rifle and fly as the gunner in an AH-64 Apache — that it breaks up what could have become a monotonous series of firefights on Afghan mountaintops.

The Taliban and al-Qaida denizens of those mountains are standard video game bad guys; they run for cover and shoot pretty well, but otherwise keep to their routes and then helpfully stay put so you can take care of them. Their predictable behavior can make battles in the campaign mode feel very contrived, however, and the script in “Medal of Honor” doesn’t let you get too creative with advancing or flanking enemies.

For example, there are too many occasions when you kill what feels like a dozen or more bad guys manning a machine gun or another fixed position, with replacements popping up like clockwork, until something triggers the game to let you call in an airstrike. If you try to dash forward and take the position, or destroy it on your own, no dice.

Other problems: Military Times’ early test version of the game had a few software bugs, so when I wanted to activate my heads-up display to see mission objectives, I switched to my M203 grenade launcher instead. In one level, I needed Dusty to jump off his ATV to advance the story, but he didn’t budge.

For all the game’s lush graphics, I also didn’t like the incredibly constrictive maps, and the game wouldn’t even let me jump from ledges onto roofs or awnings in a small village to get a better angle for combat.

The advance copy also wouldn’t let me test what will be the main selling point for most players, “Medal of Honor’s” multiplayer, although if it’s like the campaign, I’m optimistic.

I’m also optimistic that when real gamers get their hands on it, they’ll grasp the elemental concept that the bloody violence in it is all just make-believe.

“Medal of Honor” didn’t deserve to be singled out for condemnation this summer because the multiplayer lets you fight and kill Americans — video games have included that feature for a decade or more. But the military exchange services elected to boycott the game, and publisher Electronic Arts was browbeaten into deleting the word “Taliban” from the multiplayer, even as it kept the dark-skinned, obviously Afghan fighters that will form half the teams in the online mode.

The whole thing is stupid. If the things we’ve done in video games were real, an entire generation of young men, including me, would deserve to be summarily hanged for our egregious crimes.

The working dogs I called in to chew up all those U.S. Marines as a Japanese soldier in “Call of Duty: World at War”; the grenades I used to atomize the American special operators in “Rainbow Six: Vegas 2”; all those poor Liberty City cops I shot, blew up, burned and ran over in “Grand Theft Auto IV” — all of it must make me history’s worst monster.

Oh, wait — that was all pretend.