Vietnam has been the destination of choice for many a war game this year, and this might just be the grittiest of them all. Coming from 2015, developers of the acclaimed Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, the game’s intense atmosphere and attention to detail regarding weapons and locations is no surprise, what will come as a shock to many (it certainly surprised me) is just how bloody difficult MoV is.
The heritage is never far from the surface, as much like the way you played Jimmy Paterson in the early Medal of Honor games, in MoV you are Dean Shepard, farm boy recruit who is about to find out that joining up wasn’t such a good idea after all as he gets caught up in famous real battles such as Khe San and the Tet Offensive. After each mission Jimmy – oops sorry, Dean writes home or receives a letter from home, and it paints a (slightly corny) back story. Loading screens before missions contain some interesting statistics and also dispel some longstanding myths about the Vietnam War. One thing that you never lose is that you might win the battle, but you can’t win the war, and the pointlessness of the whole thing keeps slapping you in the face repeatedly, in the same way that Vietcong, Conflict Vietnam and all the other Vietnam games did – perhaps this is a testament to their realism and morality, but it sure as heck doesn’t make for a particularly appealing gaming experience.
Missions are played out in fairly small and linear old-school ‘corridor’ style levels with clear objectives marked on your compass. These sections often link into one another but lengthy loading means you never feel like you’re set in a sizable landscape like Halo, Halo 2 or Far Cry on the PC. When areas do widen out a bit, you won’t be allowed to wander too far off the beaten path, or you get warned that you’re leaving the mission area and you can even fail missions this way – which is just plain silly. Some missions add a little diversity as you take control of the gun on a Huey or a river patrol boat. Cut scenes using the game engine link the story together and try to build up the relationships between your fellow Marines, but they are really badly animated and look like placeholder (temporary) animations at times, and really should have been better.
Playing much like any other wartime FPS, MoV has standard controls, fire on the right trigger and a fine aim function set to the left trigger (this activates the scope if a sniper rifle is selected). Weapons (including grenades) are selected with the D-pad, reload is on X, you take control of turrets or search bodies with Y. Hit damage can be fixed by finding medikits or canteens from fallen enemies, and an interesting feature that I haven’t seen before is the treatment of wound damage; ‘bandage’ is set to the B button; as you take hits your health gauge (in the shape of the US Marine insignia) gets depleted, but this is only ‘bleeding damage’. This means this damage can be bandaged and fixed by holding down ‘B’, if you’re too busy in combat to do it then the flashing red area will eventually be lost, and if you’re hit again it will be lost too, so obviously the best thing to do if any significant wound is taken is to take cover and fix it. If you need a health boost then search a nearby body – chances are you’ll get a top up (although disappointingly, bodies often disappear far too quickly). This works well for much of the game but some of the levels are so hectic that progress is only possible by a bizarre and faintly ghoulish process of shoot-shoot/advance/take cover/bandage/search dead body for health ups & ammo/shoot/advance/take cover/bandage/search dead body… etc. etc.
The game moves along really nicely with some tidy graphics (if a bit too “Medal of Honor” for their own good), authentic weapons and remarkable sound and music. Thickly covered forests (or is it jungle?), yelling VC soldiers (the only way to shut them up is shoot them), bullets zipping into the ground near you (or ricocheting) and the constant banter between your squad members all carry the game along well. Choppers zoom around and kick up dust storms, great explosions, smoke and flames (that even have heat haze), sneaky VC booby traps, flocks of birds that suddenly take to the skies and loads of vegetation (LOADS) keep you constantly on your toes and battles are violent, tense and often chaotic affairs. Sadly the AI of your squad, who fight alongside you (and often stupidly wander right in front of you) virtually throughout the game, soon starts to show it’s basic nature and saps much of the believability from the game – although they unload rounds relentlessly in the general direction of the enemy and often take them down, they’ll sometimes let VC or NVA walk right by them and even block you into corners or stand on you when you’re prone – annoying when you have an enemy grouped in one area, infuriating when the enemy start to flank you or spawn behind you… The enemy AI isn’t much better but they do seem to take up intelligent positions at times – the problem is the sheer numbers of VC the you come across (yeah I know there was a lot of them – but at times it just gets ridiculous) and the ferocity of the battles, in some there are no lulls whatsoever, and they lose credibility because of this fact. General Custer and his last stand at the Little Big Horn; that’s what some missions feel like.
Not long after the AI starts to get on your wick some of the missions seem to fall flat on their faces too. A particularly daft mission sees you kidnap a Viet Cong leader – he gets knocked unconscious so you have to carry him over your shoulder, meaning you can only fire your weapon single handed. Amazingly this also means you can’t reload it or change weapons (because you can’t put him down and the game won’t let you swap weapons), so you rely on your lone squad mate to help you out. Now this could have been a cool mission with you running and gunning until you ran out of ammo, and then relying on taking cover whilst your AI buddy took out the remaining enemies, but unfortunately he’s so useless that you may as well be on your own. After countless failed attempts (I don’t throw joypads in frustration, they’re too expensive, but the game disk would definitely have got thrown out of a window a few times, if only there had been one open) the only way I could find to complete this mission was to not pick up the VC guy when I was supposed to, and clear a few VC before I attempted the run to the riverboat (this also allowed me to gather some more ammo). “Aaaaaaargh!” would sum this mission up quite well. It became apparent that as long as you followed all the on-screen instructions to the letter and stood exactly where you were supposed and followed the precise path that the designers wanted you to, everything works fine – other missions seem to just hit a repeat cycle where the VC respawn for EVER if you don’t do the right thing at the right time, and feel ‘broken’. More than a few nearly drove me nuts on occasion (the disk and the window, remember?).
Multiplayer options include a highly playable co-op mode that follows the solo campaign precisely. Split-screen multiplayer and system link options give you 10 levels for solo and team deathmatches, and 7 levels for missions (teams have an objective other than simply killing each other). Team DM & mission levels have respawn points that you can take control of, and add substantially to the feeling of taking territory. Sneaky gamers will be glad to hear that you can set booby traps, and then take cover and watch the fun. Xbox Live games seem well populated at the moment and the game plays well online, with few lag problems or frame rate issues.
Much like the war it depicts, MoV is a huge mixture of successes tainted by massive failings, and despite managing to conjure up an amazing atmosphere for the most part (there’s a level set on a ‘Hamburger-type Hill’ and in a swamp that’s the nearest thing to hell that I’ve ever come across) and supplying a decent multiplayer game, is hard to like because of its bad bits and unforgiving nature (even on the ‘easy’ setting). Good, but could have been so much better.
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