Medal of Honor: Airborne (review)

I have fond memories of first playing the demo for this game when I came across it in the Xbox 360 Marketplace online store back when I was a teenager. It was the only game I knew of at the time that explored the Italian Campaign/Front of WWII (besides Call of Duty 2: Big Red One, which also featured a mission based on Operation Husky), although in the full game only two missions took place in Italy (the 1st [based on Operation Husky] featured the Italian Blackshirts in the first half of the mission and the 2nd mission [based on Operation Avalanche] only features Nazi German troops), while the rest of the game you’re fighting the Nazis like most other WWII single player campaign games. It was disappointing when I finally bought a physical copy of MOH: Airborne, but it’s still nice to see a game that showcased the Allied Invasion of Italy, even if it was only two missions because it nearly doesn’t get as much attention as the Western Front, even the Pacific War.

Anyways, I recently finished Airborne and it was pretty good despite the campaign being on the short side and the difficulty spike in the last two levels that almost made me tear my hair out.

The gameplay was really fun, and I dug into the leaning system which made the shooting not only tactical but also immersive when ducking and dodging enemy fire and emerging from cover to shoot at enemies. Besides the protagonist you play as (another mute video game character), the other characters, particularly the US soldiers, were not much memorable, although I think the intention for the developers was not to build character development as they were only trying to capture the intense moments within the real-life WWII operations (with the exception of the last mission which is a shoe-horned in fictional mission). I also wasn’t a fan of the Nazi Elite troops enemy type which were almost out of place (not to mention annoying as hell in the last two missions of the game), which I get it, the earlier MOH had these type of plot points where they featured these Nazi top secret weapons and super enemies straight out of pulp fiction stories (something you’d also see in the early Wolfenstein titles which included Mecha Hitler) and the developers were obviously trying to replicate the early MOH titles with the Nazis creating a “ultimate weapon” to turn the tide of the war in their favor, so it doesn’t really bother me as much as anyone who think the Nazi Elite troopers to be out of place and historically inaccurate which I also understand and agree to an extent.

The weapon upgrades system was also pretty fun and encourages replayability to unlock the rest of the weapons’ upgrades, although I do not like that with two of the rifles’ third and final upgrade they turned into grenade launchers and there’s no way to switch back to rifle bullet fire or whatever you call it.

Overall, it’s a pretty fun game, although I wouldn’t say for sure if it’s as good as the earlier MOH titles, but it’s well-worth the purchase and I highly recommend it.