Medal Of Honour BETA hands on
Constant crashing aside I played the Beta for several hours last night and for the most part the game is shaping to have a very intense if slightly stiff online component. Developers DICE have proved there online prowess with the immense quality of Battlefield Bad Company so they seemed a natural choice for EA’s Medal of Honour revamp. Players of BC2 will immediately see HUD similarities once the action gets started but don’t be fooled, this is a much tighter playground then the likes of Bad Company 2′s panama Canal. The map on offer (a burnt out city street environment in Kabul and the dusty deserted Helmand Valley) would fit in your teams spawning grounds if you were playing Atacama Desert in BC2. The idea I guess is to concentrate on more intense small scaled battles to emulate the insanely popular Modern Warfare franchise.
Its very hard to judge the BETA for what it is, because its clearly a very basic version of what will be a much more detailed battleground. In the BETA you play as either American soldiers or the Taliban (still don’t know how comfortable I am with that) and you shoot it out in a two maps that are actually very well put together; one a maze of streets and building tops riddled with points that seem almost made for campers. While the other is very similar to Afghan from MW2, more open and sniper friendly. The three classes on offer at the start are pretty basic: Rifle man, sniper and heavy soldier, the weapons feel very much like the ones in Battlefield which is definitely not a bad thing but gone is the fantastic bullet physiques and fully destructible environments. Destructible environments will feature but only in the form of ‘tactical destruction’, it’s a shame because when playing some of the tighter maps in BC2 the destruction aspect really shines. Thats not to say that the game doesnt look good, even at this early stage the games environment (in particular Helmand Valley) look great.
Controls are a little bit of an oddity, instead of sticking with the battlefield layout DICE have gone with using the right bumper to mêlée and L2 to switch weapon. Its so fluid in Battlefield that I was sure the d pad would be used to switch to secondary fire. Seems like a decision that was just done so as the layout would be different from their other franchise. Enough comparing with Battlefield though, how does it compare with MW? Frankly it doesn’t, at this early stage nobody in their right mind would choose this over the carrot on a string, stat munching megalith that is infinity wards super hit. At the minute there is just so much to pick at ( the awful death screen, the millions of glitches, constant crashing etc etc) to even go there. Best thing to do is sit back and enjoy the beta until the inevitably much better public beta hits, at the moment it would be madness to judge the game on anything but the fact that developers are open enough to allow this beta to be played at such a ruff and ready stage of the game.
There are still plenty of codes to go around so if your interested then go pre order your copy of Medal of Honour now!
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