Medal of Duty or Call of Honor?

Author's Rating:

Pros: Amazing sound and graphics, good action

Cons: hard to distinguish between American and Japanese soldiers, very linear, repetitive

The Bottom Line: 
If you love Call of Duty, this will raise your blood pressure HIGH. It plays like COD with the guts of MOH with good graphics.

Author's Review
I'm a HUGE fan of Medal of Honor. I spend far too much of my copious free time playing this addictive series. I go to sleep dreaming about the multi-player games I just played before I hit the sheets. For any of you fellow addicts, I play by the name, Sneaky_Ba$tage.

It's also released under similar names for other console systems, ie: "Medal of Honor: Rising Sun" for the PS2. I resisted buying Rising Sun and wanted to wait for the PC version. I waited....and waited. In mid-November of 2004, it finally hit store shelves. I ordered it directly from EA, but this time it didn't come with the CD soundtrack (like I got with the expansion pack for "Breakthrough.")

Installation: Installation is a bit different here too. Whether you buy Pacific Assault and its FOUR CDs or Pacific Assault: Director's Cut with its DVD, they (both) have their issues. With the DVD version, I have friends who report a disruption of their network. With the CD version, the first time I wanted to boot it up and play, I kept getting a CD error and it asked me to put in the right CD in order to play the game. I had the #1 CD in the drawer...little did I know it wanted the #4 disc. That was annoying until I figured it out. Also, they've taken more steps against piracy. You'll need to register with your email address and the code on the box. The game must match the code and the email in order for you to be able to play. They also encourage the install of a program called "Punk Buster" - an anti-cheat program. Without it, many servers will not allow you to play.

A note about the Director's Cut version. If you want your game on one DVD instead of the FOUR CDs...and if you want more maps and the ability to play as an Aussie or other country's soldiers, get the Director's Cut. I don't think it's worth the extra money.

I'm a little disappointed with the newest MOH: Pacific Assault. It looks and plays exactly like Call of Duty and NOTHING like the original Medal of Honor trilogy. The original MOH is a straight-forward WW2 shooter with good graphics and great game play. Pacific Assault and COD are amazing graphics and good game play. In my Epinion, I prefer the single player mode of Pacific Assault over the original MOH. On the other hand, I prefer the multi-player mode of the original MOH trilogy over the new Pacific Assault.

The Story: You're U.S. Marine Tommy Conlin and you find yourself living through the hell that was Pearl Harbor and then lead a squad through lush jungles and beach heads throughout the Pacific Islands - against an enemy that can retreat one second and then Bonzai attack the next. Yes, you must go through basic training with a drill sergeant before you can play the game itself.

Single Player Mode: What distinguishes Pacific Assault from the original MOH trilogy is its use of squad-based commands. You can control your squad with commands like fall back, assemble on me, attack or advance. The AI (Artificial Intelligence) of your squad depends on your command in each encounter with the enemy. However, the jungle makes it tough to distinguish between the enemy and your own guys. Unlike fighting the Germans, the Japanese soldiers will rush you with weapons and bayonets blazing. This reallllly stresses me out. I have to keep firing short bursts to save ammo, but the heat of the moment gets the best of me and I find myself needing to reload more often. I find that I either have to run away to reload or switch weapons during a bonzai attack. Even when sniping, I feel nervous about the enemy sneaking up behind me with a bayonet or sword.

In MOH, you could only fire from the standing or kneeling position. In Pacific Assault, you can also crawl or lay on your belly to fire. In Pacific Assault, you can carry two primary weapons, a pistol, grenades, binoculars and explosives. You can also swap weapons (US or Japanese) at any time by hitting the F key when near the weapon you wish to exchange. When a grenade or shell hits near you, the screen will turn blurry and black & white - this is very effective visually for "shell shock."

Other key differences are "Hero Moments" and how health is attained. Hero moments are the times you really hit the enemy hard or save your own guys in the heat of battle. In the menu, you can click certain memorabilia (i.e. goggles or caps of guys you saved) and you can relive those sounds of battle. It's done with an echo effect....gunshots, guys screaming for help, etc. It's very much like a audio flashback in a war movie.

Regaining health is not as simple as in prior MOH installments. Gone are the health packs left behind after you shoot an enemy soldier. In Pacific Assault, if, or when you get shot, you need to hit the B key to help stop the bleeding and the hit H to call for a corpsman (medic). Find cover (the Japanese will attack you if out in the open) and call for the medic. He'll find his way to you and give you medical treatment - that is, if he's not injured already. Use these treatments wisely, the medics do run out of supplies. Once in a while, if you do certain brave things, you'll regain some health at certain points. Your compass will always keep track of the squad and the medic, so you can locate their positions easier. When the red cross (on the compass) flashes, that means he's already tending to another soldier.

Sound: Like usual, the sound is nothing short of masterful. If you have the right sound card and speaker set up, playing this game will sound as if you're immersed into the jungles and you can hear your enemy from all sides...maybe...LOL. It will sound like a surround sound theater. At the very minimum, use two speakers and a sub-woofer, so you can feel the explosions and gunfire - not just hear them. Also, the game sounds amazing on headphones. Likewise, the music is top notch. Eerie points have even more suspense with it's finely crafted music. When EA gave away CD copies of soundtracks to prior MOH games, they sound like Hollywood war film scores. It's not just random cheaply produced music and sound anymore, today's games demand a movie-level eargasm. After all, the video game industry has FAR surpassed the film industry in revenue.

HOWEVER... I did notice one not-so-accurate sound effect. The Browning Automatic Rifle, otherwise known as the B.A.R., sounds NOTHING like what it does in reality. I know this for two reasons, my dad told me (he carried one in Korea) and I have fired one. The game's version sounds more like a liquid cooled 50 cal. machine gun and it seems to fire a bit faster than the real B.A.R..

Pop-up Facts: At certain points in the battle, you can elect to allow pop-ups to educate you about the real battles, weapons, stats, etc.

Aiming: Just as with COD, Pacific Assault allows for more accurate aiming. To look down the sights of your weapon (including your sniper rifle) you need to hit the left ALT key. While looking through sights, your movement is much slower.

If a squadmate is in an area you'd like to be in or firing a fixed machine gun you'd like to fire, you simply get next to him and hit the F key. He relocates to another area.

Quick Save:The game has automatic check points where it saves the game, but you can always save a game at any point by hitting the F5 key.

Multi-Player Mode: Just as with Call of Duty, Multi-player is vastly different than the original MOH. It's darker and harder to distinguish the enemy soldiers.

In addition to Team Death Match and Free-For-All, there is a new "Invader Mode." This mode pits two teams against each other in a series of objective-based rounds. One team is the offense and the other is the defense. As the offensive team completes objectives, the spawning points move forward. In MOH, this is called Tug of War mode. I wish there was a Freeze Tag mode in Pacific Assault. For those of you who don't know what Freeze Tag is - when you get shot, you're frozen until your team melts you or until your team loses the round.

Classes: You have the option of which type of soldier to play as. Infantry, medic, combat engineer or Ammo Tech. As a medic, you fight with weapons, but have the ability to give medical aid to your team mates. Combat engineers can fight and plant explosives and/or mines. Ammunition Tech can carry twice as many weapons and ammo. You can also restock other players with ammo. In Invader Mode, you have the ability to swap classes as well. you really should try all of the various classes or "backpacks" in order to me more proficient at team play because each class has it's own strategic abilities. When playing as the medic, injured teammates are red on your compass, making it easier to find them and make your squad healthy.



Like I said, I like the single player mode on Pacific Assault, but prefer the multi-player game in the original MOH trilogy. The single player game gets very repetitious in places. Fight a Japanese squad, patch yourself up and move down the line to attack more Japanese soldiers. The only thing that changes is the scenery. I find myself not wanting to play long periods of time in single player and then get frustrated at multi-player mode because I don't know who to shoot at until it's too late.

One big issue I have with the single player mode is that the maps take forever to load. Each time you die, just to get back to the game depends a great deal on your computer. Make sure you have a great graphics card and enough memory, or the picture will get a bit choppy and laggy. The game was written for HT Technology (Hyper Threading) on the Pentium 4.

I have to agree with Jerryku, the single player game is very linear with little room to flank the enemy, whereas the multi-player game is wide open - even more than other WW2 games I've played.

RATING: I give this game three and a half stars overall, but gave it three here (only because there are no half stars).


Minimum requirements:
OS: Windows XP or 2000
CPU: 1.5 GHz or faster
RAM: 512 or more
Disc Drive: 8x or faster
Hard Drive: at least 3.0 GB of free space
Sound: DirectX 8.1 compatible card
Video: DirectX 8.1 compatible card: Must have 64 MB or more of memory and one of the following; ATI Radeon 8500 or greater, NVIDIA GeForce3 or greater EXCEPT for the GeForce4 MX.
Will NOT run on dial-up connections.

Rated T for TEEN.