review: Medal of Honor: Allied Assault - Breakthrough

While waiting for EB to give me The Call (of Duty), I decided to get MoHAA: Breakthrough to pass the time in a similar WWII fashion. A minor annoyance is that EA released a battlechest earlier this summer with only the first expansion, and they'll probably do the same in couple months with the entire set. As if EA needed any more cash. Don't get me wrong though - I love the series and I'll probably get the new battlechest regardless.

One thing for sure is that it's much longer than Spearhead, so you at least get your money's worth. But judging from some of the initial reviews, I wasn't sure what to expect. After being thrown into a sandstorm in the Battle of Kasserine Pass (the first Tunisian mission) I was ready to partake in some cinematic styled WWII action. And for a second I actually believed this. But after playing through the 12 sub-missions spanning the deserts of North Africa to the heart of Italy, my initial hopes were quickly dashed.

Some of the missions are just overly tough, like one in Algiers where you must protect a German intelligence informant while he tries to pick a lock on a rooftop door. I ran out of ammo halfway across the rooftops, and when I realized what was happening at the locked door I was being shot at from one side and had grenades lobbed from another. Other missions are just your standard cannon demolition missions we've seen many times before. Even some of the towns you travel through are generic looking - there was really no evidence you were battling your way through Sicily and Italy. And after awhile the seemingly endless bunkers and stone structures I was forced to run through felt like retreads - at one point I felt like I was playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein. There were also too many rail shooting sequences, where I was forced to man the machine gun on a jeep that zoomed through a bombed out town while taking out Nazis that popped into view (Remember why Star Wars: Rebel Assault sucked?). The last battle for Monte Cassino at Anzio was a definite highlight, and provided many tense skirmishes, but it was too little too late. And even the "Protect the Radio Tower" mission smacked of the last mission in the original Allied Assault where you have to defend a bridge from demolition.

I found that the ammo is extremely scarce, even on normal difficulty - I did an awful lot of pistol whipping near the end of some missions. However what drove me really crazy is the fact that a guy that was filling me with holes 5 seconds previously didn't leave his gun with his corpse. I imagine this is some way of increasing the difficulty, but at the cost of common sense? This hardly seems like the MOHAA of old. There were also a few sequences where you are swarmed with enemies; which is not a bad thing, except when combined with the lack of ammo drops and health packs. And don't give me that realism bullshit - there's a mission where I'm riding around in a jeep with a medic, who I am defending with my life, and he doesn't even offer to heal me along the way. Annoyingly there are also serious problems with hit locator/register. I was in control of an 88 mm cannon, but beyond the direct hits the enemy just kept on coming. No splash damage? It seemed a bit ridiculous. Also, mowing down enemy soldiers when I was able to gain control of machine gun emplacements proved to be a chore - the Nazis seemed to be able to dodge bullets. I did however like the added Italian weapons like the Moschetto submachine gun and the Beretta - the latter being the coolest handgun ever. In some of the low-ammo situations, I was able to take out quite a few enemy soldiers with one or two clips.

Graphically not much can be said for Breakthrough. The Quake III engine is getting very long in the tooth, and as much as some have claimed that a few tweaks were made here and there I didn't see them. Some little problems I had were the lack in texture variety, which was carried over from Spearhead even. The Opel transport trucks that were used by the Germans were always emblazoned with the familiar "Afrika Corps" logo on the cab doors - which was fine in the Northern Africa missions. But in Bastogne in the dead of winter? Or Italy? I even noticed "U.S." stenciled on a British paratrooper's canteen in Breakthrough.

The enemy AI ranges from quasi-tactical to incredibly stupid (the scripting couldn't be any more obvious). A couple of times I fragged three out of four guys almost point blank, and the one that escaped the blast just stood there until I shot him. Huh?

As we have come to expect from the series, the score, sound and voice acting are excellent - but without a solid mission to really ground you in the game, they kind of get overlooked. I quickly grew annoyed at AI controlled Allies that yelled at me to clear out some bunker or search out some offending AA guns, and then sat there without helping (or worse, walk aimlessly into enemy fire).

This brings me to one of the things I find amusing about the series - and it's been intensified by this latest expansion - the game pits you, a lone American soldier, against the entire Third Reich. Well, it seems that way at least. I mean sure, you save some AI allies or meet up with some along the way, but they don't do much except get themselves killed. I know that the famous Omaha Beach map from Allied Assault was a memorable gaming moment, and that's because you're fighting alongside AI controlled squadmates that do exhibit some form of intelligence, even if it's scripted. The later missions in the original game followed the same principle - while securing the hedgerows of Normandy, you meet up with other soldiers who fight with you, and sometimes even mission objectives depended on you keeping each other alive. I liked that. But somehow this style of play has been lost over the two expansions - the WWII experience as told by 2015 has been turned into some sort of Rambo-styled bulletfest. And disturbingly, at some points there even aren't enough bullets.

I am in love with the subject material for Breakthrough but I am really reluctant to recommend this expansion. All it does is make me long for the squad combat promised by Call of Duty. The guys that left 2015 for Infinity Ward have some good ideas, and as I've said many times before they are on target to deliver. Breakthrough is just a filler expansion, and it shows - for fans of the series you're better off waiting for Pacific Assault.