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Medal of Honor: Warfighter Review

14 November 2012





The gameplay in Warfighter is archaic. Besides the occasional vehicle segment, or set piece, players are tasked with taking down every enemy firing at them. Enemies are brain-dead and seem to come from nowhere. Once they are dead, you move forward, likely breach a door, and repeat this formula again. There is very little choice given to the player while trudging through the single-player campaign either, even though battlefields are portrayed beautifully and often look to extend beyond view. However, traveling past lines the game doesn't want you to cross will issue you a warning to return to the game area. The penalty for not returning is death. In actuality, areas of combat are often pretty small, and choices for where to take cover and fire from are slim. When you do find cover, there's a good chance one of your partners with terrible AI will run into you, knocking you into the line of fire and taking your cover until the next wave of baddies appears. Enemies stick to their assigned spots, though, popping out of cover occasionally to shoot at you. We never were engaged in combat, though the sound and excitement of the battlefield would suggest so.

We'd aim from behind cover, wait for an enemy to peek out, neutralize them, and repeat this for the other six enemies in the area, and then travel onward to do this again. Though using the guns feel great, it does grow old. This repetitive gameplay is broken up by fairly enjoyable vehicle segments and parts of the game where you are given special objectives. After these, you'll be brought back to the pattern of normal warfare. On top of this, Warfighter's framerate is often an issue, and glitches plague the game online and off. During one skirmish, we fell through the floor of a building. Looking up, we saw our comrades floating in air, still continuing the fight. Our weapons wouldn't fire, and our grenades wouldn't explode. We wandered this wasteland of floating buildings until eventually the game determined we were out of the mission area, and killed us.

Warfighter's platoon-based online gameplay is decent fun, but its lacking customization and uninspired map design won't take any first-person shooter fans away from Call of Duty or Killzone servers. Shooting doesn't seem as real or as satisfying online, and it often feels like enemies, as well as yourself, take far too many bullets to go down. Streak rewards, an online FPS mainstay, are here in a satisfying fashion, however. Points for streaks are earned through doing well in a match. Mortar strikes, smoke-screens, choppers, turrets, and spawn-choice are all rewards redeemable for streak points. There are multiple game modes that require different objectives of the online teams. Hotspot is a mode where multiple points for destruction are shown to the offensive team, while a main spot is shown to the defensive team to give them a chance to fortify the specific area. The area that serves as the objective will then be shown to the offensive team. The hotspot will change after each area is defended or destroyed. There is also a twist on Capture the Flag called Home Run, and there is of course deathmatch and the rest of the basic modes most shooters include. Customization of avatars is minimal, but extensive for the game's guns. Optics, barrel assembly, muzzle style, receiver group style, magazine, and paint job are the options available when tricking out your favorite firearm. All in all, Warfighter's online gameplay is a decent diversion from the game's campaign, but isn't something we see many players falling in love with.

Medal of Honor: Warfighter is a broken game in multiple ways. It is literally broken, in the sense that glitches abound, and players will often find themselves losing sound during gameplay, or clipping through solid objects during firefights. And it is also broken in the sense that it seems the game isn't entirely sure what it would like to be. While the gameplay feels like it's attempting to capture the action audience with its explosive set pieces and gung-ho attitude, the firefights that make up the majority of the game are uninspired and boring. The game's cutscenes show men who tear up talking about their experiences as military men, and then forces you to kill hundreds of enemies without hesitation in the game's campaign, rewarding you for brutal kills and never even hinting at your soldier's emotions or if he's thinking about the lives he's ended. Warfighter can't decide if it wants to portray these soldiers as scarred men or action heroes. Though firing the weapons feels very good, the firefights suffer because of poor AI and level design. Some of the events and vehicle sections during the campaign show promise and provide a break from the monotonous shoot-outs, but they aren't enough to save the game from being boring, and generic. The game's multiplayer provides a decent amount of fun, but, compared even to multiplayer shooters of past, it feels outdated.

-The Final Word-

  • Lighting and detailed textures breathe life into the game's environments
  • Guns feel realistic and satisfying
  • Glitchy gameplay becomes annoying and repetitive
Platforms reviewed : PlayStation 3
See PSU's reviews scores on Metacritic and Gamerankings

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