E3 2010: Report from the show floor – Medal of Honor Beta
Words by: Jeff Barker | Posted on: Tuesday 22nd June, 2010 | Filed under: E3 2010, Industry Events, News.
I have to confess I actually played several sessions of this, it was that good. I’m not going to get into the comparisons but if you want an idea of how it feels, imagine a cross between Call of Duty and Battlefield, with all the best aspects of each.
The show floor pods were all running team deathmatch, on a map set in an Afghan village, but I also got to try out a Battlefield-style mode where you set charges to destroy objectives – enormous fun and the best mode in the Bad Company series so it’s something I’m very glad they’ve included. The game doesn’t look at all like Battlefield though, even though it’s running on the same engine – the UI and art style are completely different, although the weight and speed of the controls will be instantly familiar to any fan of DICE‘s most recent work. That said, the game looks gorgeous – very detailed, excellent textures (with one or two glaring omissions that will presumably be ironed out before release) and excellent weapon and character models (those beards!).
There were three classes available – seemingly with fixed loadouts, though I imagine that was only the demo – Sniper (a sniper class), Rifleman (a standard infantryman) and Spec Ops (a light scout). In terms of play style it’s fairly fast, faster than Battlefield but still not up to the ADD pace of Modern Warfare. Weapons damage is towards the hardcore end of the scale, it only takes a couple of shots to die but on the bright side, that means you only need to put a couple of rounds into someone to kill them. The guns and classes seem well balanced, as far as it’s possible to tell from a short demo, and the vehicles are… well, there weren’t any in the demo so I don’t know about that. My one gripe with the game is that at two points in the objective -capturing variant I died for no reason, with a “-10 points” for suicide adding insult to injury. I wasn’t the only person to experience this, but thankfully it’s the kind of bug that gets picked up in testing, so don’t expect to see it in the final game.
Taste is subjective of course, but I enjoyed it enough to queue up again, and again after that. The good news is that starting next week you can see for yourself; codes for the beta are being given out by retailers (and possibly online), which can then be redeemed at http://medalofhonor.com/beta – hopefully see you online!
Article supplied by the XCN.
About Jeff Barker
Jeff has been with the Xboxer360 team since April 2009. He is well known for his love of sandals and frequently exhibits Rainman-like behaviour, which is even more amazing now he's a Dad. He prefers third person action/adventure titles and RPG's, but will happily turn his hand to pretty much anything.
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