Believe it or not, I recently found myself starved of first person shooters set in WW2.  I have only just begun to enjoy the genre, and so, having gone through CoD:World at War and Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway on all difficulty settings multiple times, I found myself at a local store searching for any old titles in the genre that might still be available.  I am extremely partial to the Pacific Theatre which is part of the reason why I am a latecomer to these types of games.  I noticed there were several Medal of Honor boxes, and though I have heard the last couple entries in that franchise blew, I remember back when they used to win awards and regularly garner high ratings.  One caught my eye: Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault.  The word “Pacific” is what did it and I soon found myself at home staring at the launch screen, pleased that the game was old enough that I had no problem going all the way on the graphical settings.

     I was surprised too; the game looked pretty good considering how old it was: 2004.  The launch screen depicted a base camp tent on some island and the radio was going.  News bits were spouting and it added to the atmosphere of the game, just like a lot of the tunes heard when radios are going during scenes without combat.  Yeah, all the music is from that era and keeping with that same attention to preserving atmosphere, the character models, even the ones representing the toughest of the crew, all seemed decidedly scrawny compared to other series.  Because this is how it was.  Tough guys from the forties would be passed over as malnourished rejects by today’s hulks.  First, these kids were young, and second, knowledge of nutrition and health, as well as strength training and steroids wasn’t as advanced as it is today.  The models seemed a tad cartoony and dopey, but the poly count has more to do with that then the choice made by the artists.  The environments I found beautiful though, the jungles even with a distinct lack of super advanced lighting techniques and atmospheric effects, looked complex and there was a beauty to the crispness of it all.

     It did take a little while to get going, as right away, after a brief introductory scenario, you are obligated to control your character through his days at boot camp which acts as a tutorial that was so tedious and boring in its elementariness I thought about quitting out and never looking back.  Thankfully, I persevered and a little way through the second mission, I started to see this game for what it was: a brilliant masterpiece.  No, just kidding: it is a decent WW2 shooter set in the pacific theater and if you are even a little bit of a fan to the subject, you need to check this title out.

     Most of MoH: Pacific Assault’s value lay in the different ways you can make your way through the various maps to reach your objective.  While this seems a feature of every WW2 shooter as of late, it seems whether you go right or left you’re still going to be ducking, leaning, shooting and ducking behind cover again until all the baddies are dead, or you’ve opened up a gap to press forward enough to negate spawn points, depending on what game you’re playing.  In Pacific Assault, many of the areas are quite large, and you can tackle them in noticeably different ways.  In one scenario, I had to make my way to a gas depot.  While hiking through a jungle road, I noticed a break in one side of the foliage.  I followed the hidden trail until it put my squad mates and me (who followed with no orders needed) right behind a Japanese machine gun nest.  After massacring the crew, we heard one of the many trucks using the road. As they came upon us, I opened up on the engine with the Japanese gun, causing an explosion which killed the driver, officer and most of the soldiers being transported.  The leftovers were treated to a lead extravaganza by my bros and me.  Sweet victory.  I could have stuck to the road if I had wanted to and found a different hidden path or even just kept all the way on the road, dealing with the machine gun nests and trucks in different ways.  There are many instances like this in the game and this old game really feels fresh after carving my way through World at War and even Hell’s Highway, whose squad based combat has some similarity to this game’s.

     You are part of a squad and in the beginning you can’t issue orders with the exception of the “H” command, which you can issue immediately as it is essential to healing yourself of damage.  Unlike current shooters your health is rated in points in this game and once you’re out, you lie on the ground half conscious for a while, until either a Japanese soldier finds you and guts you with a perfunctory “Shi - ne!” or your medic manages to reach you and heal you, or you bleed out before either of those things can happen.  To insure your fate doesn’t come to that chance outcome, you can call on the medic at any time by pressing the “H” key which summons him to heal you.  I do enjoy the seemingly more realistic “danger indicator” in the Call of Duty series over just having hit points, but this preference changes with the addition of this “call medic” feature.  It adds strategy to the game in that you only get three heals per checkpoint and leaving when you heal to your discretion.  Also, when teammates fall, you can pick them up and bring them close to the medic so he can heal them, though really, they do just fine without this help and I never found myself using the feature.  Just like the squad order commands.

     Whereas in Hell’s Highway ordering your troops to do things is definitely helpful, it is not necessary; in Pacific Assault it is both not helpful and absolutely not necessary.  Although the point is now certainly moot, the commanding of squad mates is an excessively easy affair, you simply hit an arrow key to deliver a command: Forward, Fall Back, Suppress or Take Cover, and since you can’t specify a location for where the command is to be executed, it is a less than precise function.  Good thing you never need it as the troops are surprisingly competent by themselves, which is also refreshing, though they still exhibit some serious accuracy problems in certain situations with certain enemies that all these games have, a measure taken by the programmers I am sure, to make sure it is the character who does the bulk of the work in the missions.  In addition to leading the charge even when you’re not in command, you’ll find yourself volunteered for all the demolitions work, grenadiering, sniping and “odd jobs” in every scenario.  Of course this just means more fun in the sun for you.

     There is a good mix of villages, beaches and some naval operations but since most of the game takes place on Guadalcanal the majority of the environment is in the jungle.  Other spots include Makin Atoll and Tarawa, and as a whole, the historical accuracy in how the areas were set up (the Japanese camps and trench systems are cool) and the major battles that were fought (Bloody Ridge is a blast) maintains integrity.  Of course, there are many aspects where the game is glamorized “Hollywood- style”; like the fact that you’re almost a one man army who can fill any soldiering role, and there are a few battles, particularly one where you are defending Henderson field from a simultaneous air raid and ground assault, that will have anyone with historical knowledge of these battles rolling their eyes.  But that’s to be expected.  If they didn’t bend the rules a little, even if you were lucky enough to make it to Tarawa, the game would probably end there with you being shot dead in the water during your amphibious landing and we simply can’t have that.  Although realistically, you would have probably died before Tarawa when, while flying en route to a staging area in a Dauntless, your pilot gets shot in the face and bails out and you are forced to crawl to the front of the aircraft, take control amidst a dogfight swarming with Zeroes and fight your way free without a tail gunner to proceed on and fly several sorties before landing on a carrier.  And we come to my huge problem with this game: the flight mission.

     It starts off great, just another mission where you are manning a gun, leading enemy aircraft to their doom, until the aforementioned tragedy occurs and you are left to fly the trusty dive-bomber by yourself.  This may have some of you excited.  I love flight sims.  Il-2 is one of my favorite games of all time.  Of course the physics and flight mechanics are nowhere near that masterpiece, but that’s not the problem either.  What is the problem?  The terrible controls and the fact that they are executed solely with the mouse, making the ariel missions some of the worst moments I have ever spent in a game to date.  And I have been playing video games on almost every platform available for twenty – five years.  It’s sad that such a well-executed game is almost destroyed by such a poorly implemented feature.  There is no enabling joystick control either, and I suspect many who fight their way to the latter half of the game will stop at this mission, right before blistering Tarawa and quit, never to return.  Well, at least the first two-thirds of the game rocks.

     A few other minor quibbles I have are that some of the objectives are unclear and the weapons selection, even with all the different types of heavy ordinances you get to play with at certain points, is lacking.  Not even the awesome B.A.R. is relegated to a special mission where you get to use it for about thirty seconds.  Staples include the M1 Garand, Thompson sub-machine gun and Japanese Arisaka rifle and Type- 100, frag grenades, and if memory serves me, that’s it.

     Another thing that annoyed me was sometimes you can have a grenade thrown at you and be aware of it.  There is no indicator and if you are not watching whoever chucked the explosive, and not looking at where it lands, you may get hit.  Sometimes your comrades will warn you but not always.  Although I liked this mechanic as much as disliked it, as it added tension and realism.  Also, the grenades never seem to do too much damage unless you caught one in your mouth.

     All in all, a good game with one glaring problem and if you can find it for five bucks and enjoy the pacific theatre you’re in for a real treat, until you hit the airplane mission.

                                                                              -jr

     Score: 7 Good

    

 

PC Review: Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault