Medal of Honor: Airborne

It seems you can't read a preview or review of a World War II-based FPS without hearing about how many games there are in the genre. With good reason, too--it's a crowded one. But just because there are a lot of them doesn't mean there can't be some good ones. Medal of Honor: Airborne is one such game. It starts off really slow, and the whole parachuting hook is little more than a gimmick; but later on the game realizes its potential and gets good.

There's not much of a story to Airborne. It's WWII; Nazis need killing and the world needs saving. You're in the Airborne division, so you'll be jumping out of planes and doing your part to swing the war in the Allies' favor. Before each mission you're given a brief rundown on what's going on and list of objectives to accomplish. Rather than spawning on the battlefield you'll arrive in style by parachuting out of a plane. As you fall to the ground you'll want to maneuver toward green smoke, which indicates a safe landing zone. In theory, parachuting into the level is supposed to open up a whole new style of play. You're free to land wherever you want, but invisible walls prevent you from getting too clever, and nine times out of 10, when you do land somewhere other than the safe zone you'll end up dead in a matter of seconds. There are some special landing zones to discover and sometimes these areas will provide you with an advantageous starting point, but because you find most of these locations when you're already on the ground, they're of little use.

Once on the ground you'll take on waves of Axis soldiers over the course of the game's six levels. Six levels might not sound like a lot, but each generally takes an hour or more to complete, so it'll probably take most people around eight hours to finish the game. Your objectives are shown on your radar and you're free to tackle them in whatever order you choose. Between choosing your starting location and being able to pick what to take on first it might sound like there's a lot of freedom here, but there's really not--you can't start from many different places, and you have to do the same tasks regardless of the order you start them. Mission objectives range from blowing up AA guns to clearing buildings of enemy soldiers, taking out tanks, and detonating lots of explosives. On their own these tasks aren't anything unique, but because the levels are so long and feature so many objectives you often feel as though you're performing monumental feats rather than routine tasks.

The first three levels aren't very interesting. They're fairly linear, take place in unexciting settings, and don't play to the game's strengths. Starting with the fourth level the game picks up since you're given more freedom as to how you want to tackle the levels. You might decide to climb towers to take out snipers (their position is given away by a reflection off their scope), clear the area of ground troops, and then make your way into a building, while a different player might head to the building first, clear the ground troups second, and hide from the snipers rather than kill them. The game's artificial intelligence isn't very good, but at least it's aggressive. You can pick off guys as they peek around corners, but they won't just take it lying down. They'll spray bullets in your direction without looking, and they're rather fond of blindly tossing grenades over their backs. If you get too close or they get some reinforcements, enemy soldiers will charge right at you and inflict serious damage until you can fend them off with your weak melee attacks.

The controls are pretty standard on both the PC and the 360. A sprint button comes in quite handy when trying to dash from one bit of cover to the next. Once you're behind that cover, the ability to lean and fire is extremely useful, as is the ability to raise your weapon and aim using its sights. As you progress through the game you'll be able to upgrade your weapons, earning bigger clips, faster reloads, and secondary firing abilities. You can carry two weapons at a time as well as a pistol, which isn't very powerful but has unlimited ammo. Grenades are often tough to come by, but ammunition is plentiful, as are health packs, which are scattered throughout the levels. It's a good thing, too, because once you start getting hit your health depletes in a hurry.

While most of Airborne is good, it does have its share of problems. Hit detection is terrible--it's not uncommon to hit someone with three or four shots before even one registers. Many of the automatic weapons have too much recoil, making them extremely difficult to aim--a problem not shared by the CPU, who is more than capable of hitting you from across the level regardless of the gun. Your fellow soldiers are sometimes quite useful, but other times they don't do anything at all--or worse, they stand right in front of you and block your shot. We also fell out of the level a few times, though this was usually when we parachuted someplace the game probably didn't want us to. When all of these problems come together the game can be extremely frustrating, as you're forced to try the same part of a level over and over again in an attempt to find the best way to circumvent the game's sometimes cheap tactics.

Unlike the last Medal of Honor, MOH: Airborne has a solid online component. Up to 12 people can hop online and play ranked and unranked matches on half a dozen maps and a few different game types. The action's always fast-paced and for us, at least, lag-free. Interestingly enough, multiplayer is the one area where choosing where you want to parachute into a level actually lives up to the hype. As you descend you can see both friends and foes and, if you're quick enough, can land in areas that are quite advantageous--like right behind that jerk camping on a rooftop with a sniper rifle.

Airborne isn't a great-looking game, but it does run well and the visuals don't hamper the experience. It looks best on the PC thanks to higher quality textures. Outside of a few nice-looking buildings most structures are simple, and look pretty much the same, not only to each other, but every other WWII game out there. There are only a few different types of soldiers and while they aren't very detailed, you can tell one type from the next easily. At least, you can if you're up close. It's tough to tell the good guys from the bad guys when you're far apart, and it's even harder to hit them thanks to a lack of transition animation, meaning they might instantly jump from one position to the next. Weapons look great, but explosions look embarrassingly last-gen. Not only do weapons look nice, but they sound great, too. The rest of the game sounds pretty good as well. You'll hear the familiar orchestral theme from previous MOH games, and there's lots of chatter from both Axis and Allied soldiers.

Medal of Honor: Airborne is a game that rewards those who are patient enough to stick with it. The first half of the game is dull and just rehashes the same sort of gameplay you've seen countless times before. But about halfway through, things pick up and gradually get better and better until the last two levels, which are quite intense and a lot of fun to play. The multiplayer isn't anything groundbreaking, but it's quite good and adds some value to an otherwise short game. If you're tired of the genre, Airborne won't do anything to change your mind, but if you're looking to fight for the Allied cause yet again, it's a worthy tour of duty.


By Aaron Thomas, GameSpot

ThreadSpace: Hyperbol

ThreadSpace: Hyperbol his one of those deceptively deep games. It seems like the quintessentially simple arcade game at first blush, but eventually reveals itself to be one of those easy-to-learn, hard-to-master challenges capable of sponging up your spare time. Even though some pace and balancing issues--along with the near-complete absence of a solo mode of play--mar the otherwise shiny finish of this tactical shooter, the game remains intriguing both for its promise and for what it does right.

Developer Iocaine Studios began with the simple turret-shooter concept, which is practically as old as time itself, and tricked it out with strategic elements. The game is played in deep space, albeit on the two-dimensional planes of interstellar interstate highways called hyperchannels, which were left behind by an ancient civilization. These outer-space landscapes look a bit like the computer scenery in Tron due to their flatness, sparse details, and reliance on cartoony neon colors (a resemblance accentuated by the techno score and metallic weapon effects). You pilot gun-turret ships across these Lite-Brite battlefields, constantly rotating and occasionally moving both to take cover and to get a good firing line on enemies. Controls are elementary. Selecting a projectile to fire is handled by clicking on an icon on the left and bottom of the screen, while actually firing is taken care of with the left mouse button. Most missile functions are activated with a tap of the spacebar, and the camera is rotated with the mouse and the WASD keys. If you can't figure everything out on your own, an extensive series of tutorials lays out of all the particulars.

Gameplay options are somewhat blah, though. Aside from the tutorials and a couple of time trials, the only solo modes of play are skirmishes against bots. Changing the difficulty setting is the only option here, so single-player gets dull fast. The bots generally aren't very bright, and on the lower two settings they're stupid enough that they regularly blow up their own ships, and can't seem to hit the broad side of a barn when firing at you. This means that your only real choice is multiplayer, which also doesn't offer the greatest selection of modes. The gameplay types are old chestnuts such as deathmatch, team deathmatch, last man standing, and destroy objective. These games are livened up with the inclusion of three factions that influence your starting ship (there are five core ship classes that have varying capabilities when it comes to engines, projectile speed, and so forth), as well as a persistent-world gimmick in which you vote on systems to continue an ongoing war, and finally the ability to earn credits for ship upgrades.

Of course, interesting options don't matter much when few people are playing online, and the Hyperbol servers are largely deserted most of the time. Normally you can find only a single competitive match with human players, and the handful of constantly running trainee games are almost always filled with nothing but bots. So you're left with the depressing choice of either playing a multiplayer version of the solo game, complete with the same old dumb bots, or jumping right into the deep end against experienced high-level players who will mercilessly blow you to bits with their seriously upgraded ships. You too can eventually move up in level and gain access to tricked-out ship hardware, but advancement is painfully slow for beginners because the deck seems stacked against you through the first few hours of play.

No matter what selection you make, the matches favor defense. There are lots of options that enhance the strategic side of battles, maps are loaded with cover, and you can't move very far or very often due to limited engine fuel as well as slow weapon- and engine-recharge rates. Destinations have to be chosen carefully, given that you're inevitably stuck in your new spot for a few seconds while your engines rev up enough for you to move again. So if you make a mistake, you can leave yourself wide open to withering enemy fire for what seems like an eternity.

Weapons add to the sense that you're taking part in sci-fi trench warfare. Offensive projectiles such as rockets, cluster bombs, detonation bombs, and even the nuclear option presented by hyperbols and hyperplasms take second place to the many defensive choices. Certain nifty options make it more sensible to sit back and hope for a bit of good luck than to charge the enemy, including weapons such as the singularity generator, which sucks enemy projectiles into black holes, as well as the repair drone that can be used to fix up ships, the energy fences that create de facto walls, and the missile-deflecting shockwave. Furthermore, projectiles can be set up to angle after launch, so you can hole up behind objects and still curve shots right on target. So after an initial jockeying for position, you inevitably wind up with nearly everyone hunkered down behind cover, well protected by black holes and energy fences, blasting away and waiting for the other guy to screw up.

Still, matches feature an interesting blend of methodical movements and fast-paced shooting. Sixteen players can take part in games, and the cramped maps generally feature few truly open spaces, so precise tactics are frequently interrupted when you either run into a wall or wander into the firing line of a foe that has some hyperbols loaded up. There are so many options here when it comes to projectile deployment that it's always tempting to keep playing to try to figure out good tactics to get past all of the seemingly rock-solid defenses that can be constructed. Also, matches with experienced players who really know what they're doing raise the bar. If you play a few games with veterans, you soon begin to see the importance of teamwork, both when coordinating attacks and when working together to defend one another. (Buddies who know what they're doing will often help you out with some repair drones when you're helpless and taking enemy fire). As mentioned above, there is a lot of depth here; it just takes some time to explore it, and this process is slowed down by the lack of games for all player levels.

As a pure multiplayer game, ThreadSpace: Hyperbol is a bit overpriced even at $20 on Steam. But despite the balance issues and the almost total absence of solo modes of play, the innovative and addictive concepts presented here are worth checking out, even if the game as a whole isn't quite ready for prime time.

By Brett Todd, GameSpot