Medal of Honor: Warfighter (Xbox 360) review "The plot isn’t the only thing that jumps around a lot, though. Gameplay style also varies to a surprising degree, and I was somewhat startled by the realization that many of my favorite scenes were those that feel the least like they belong in an FPS title."

As I prepared to review Medal of Honor: Warfighter, I was briefly tempted to begin by opening a browser window and finding someone else’s review, then changing a few words around and posting it as my own. I wouldn’t actually do that, of course, and yet the approach almost seemed appropriate because Warfighter resembles the product that might result if someone took a similar approach to game design.

The source of inspiration in this particular case appears to be Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. If you’ve already read my review for that other title, you know that I liked it a lot. However, I also came away feeling that it lacked a certain creative spark. It was a polished package, refined to a point where it practically gleamed, but that only meant that it worked well enough to earn a recommendation. Flair aside, Modern Warfare 3 didn’t offer much that might appeal to those who hadn’t already fallen in love with the genre, and it didn’t push its franchise forward meaningfully. Instead, it represented a tentative step in the wrong direction for a series that until that point had never been content to do things by half measure.

Warfighter seems to have taken more confident steps along that wrong path that Modern Warfare 3 tread ahead of it, I’m sorry to say. Though part of me admires its resolve, the game too often lacks the polish that allowed its apparent inspiration to fake its way to a strong finish. As much as I dislike the sense of oppressive familiarity that defines the Warfighter experience, though, what bugs me even more is its lack of focus. The developers seem to have had trouble settling on the story they wanted to tell, on the game they wanted to make. That difficulty likely doomed their efforts from the very start.

I mentioned story, so perhaps I should start my analysis by explaining how that aspect of the game fell apart. Warfighter begins with some soldiers rising out of dark water and surveying a warehouse district ahead of them. I know a country is named in the text that appears somewhere on the screen (I want to say Pakistan), but those letters don’t matter much because the game eventually jumps all over the globe—mostly making stops in Muslim countries—and the settings aren’t ever particularly relevant except as window dressing. What you’re supposed to worry about is the heroes and their struggles to deal with the cost of war as they put their lives on the line to secure the world’s safety.

I’m checking my notes now, and I see that the names of those brave fictional men are Preacher, Mother, Stump and Voodoo. By the time I made my way through most of the game, I had given up on remembering who was who unless I wrote it all down somewhere, because unfortunately the characters do very little that’s interesting. Preacher, who has what you might call the starring role, is only interesting when he’s talking to his wife on the phone or in a diner or elsewhere, and you’re never actually controlling the interactions during those scenes. The other characters are even less memorable, aside from a few lines of dialogue that may or may not make you chuckle as you duck for cover in the middle of a stealth mission. I’m not sure why they are so chatty while trying to get the drop on terrorist soldiers, but I guess it’s their right.

The plot starts big (at least when you measure it by the number of bullets fired and by the volume of explosions) and it doesn’t often settle down from there. However, the cutscenes jump around the timeline more than feels prudent. One scene takes place 8 months ago, then the next one is in the present, and then you’ll go back in time once more and it’ll be a few weeks ago, and then “present” plays out and maybe a few months pass—or maybe not—and what once was present feels like a distant memory. There’s text you can consult in the likely event that you get lost somewhere along the way. Plot progression is a mess until nearly the end, though, and the overarching arc is comprised of the predictable sort of stuff you’d probably dream up within 30 seconds if someone asked you to concoct the plot for a war game: some bad guy hates Americans and is gathering weapons so he can blow them all to smithereens.

The plot isn’t the only thing that jumps around a lot, though. Gameplay style also varies to a surprising degree, and I was somewhat startled by the realization that many of my favorite scenes were those that feel the least like they belong in an FPS title. In a couple of missions, you’re essentially playing a racing game with one fixed viewpoint (inside the car). The second of those missions finds you dodging enemy vehicles and pulling into alleyways to hide from patrolling forces as you progress toward the exit point in a zone. It’s fairly intense mission. In an unrelated scene, you’re escaping with hostages in a boat and the city around you is half submerged. Buildings are toppling to either side of you and sparking power lines lash in gusts of wind. Sheets of rain drive against you as you dodge enemies and return fire. It’s arguably one of the most engrossing scenes yet depicted in a military shooter (one that deserves to be part of a great overall game), and it’s brought to life by the Frostbyte 2 engine that also powered Battlefield 3. EA clearly provided the tech that enabled the development of a very pretty shooter.

Unfortunately, the actual shooting bits don’t play as well as they look like they should. One early mission finds you suddenly tasked with sniping enemies that are crawling all over buildings like ants on caffeine. You’ll fail the mission if you don’t take out the targets quickly enough, but you’re lying on a table positioned in a building across the street from your foes. You’ll take out a few goons and then perhaps you’ll have trouble picking off the last target. He seems to be invincible—or maybe he’s just really, really good at dodging—until you learn that you’re supposed to adjust for distance and bullet drop. There’s no reference to that anywhere else in the game, or on any load screens that I could see. I might still be fruitlessly shooting at the guy and just barely missing if I hadn’t headed to Twitter to vent my frustration.

Standard shooting segments make up the remainder of the game, and those also prove disappointing because they are awkwardly executed. When you’re not inching through claustrophobic corridors with a handful of armed guards waiting around each twist and turn, you’re advancing through more open spaces littered with crates and bunkers. They look almost as if they’ve just been tossed from a Yahtzee cup, and you’ll have to dash between them in short sprints because remaining in the open for long is certain suicide. Then you get to take potshots at your enemies while they return fire. You’ll repeat that process for a bit while your squad members take up point, and then no one will advance even after the path forward has apparently been cleared. You’ll find yourself staring at a building ahead of you and all your guys will just stand around, or maybe they’ll fire at a building and not even come close to hitting anything. So you’ll finally start forward—just to lure out some enemies so you can shoot them and get things moving again—and instead someone will take you out with a single shot, or you won’t be able to step back in time to avoid going down in a hail of gunfire because one of your squad members will get in the way. In some cases, I’ve even had squad mates push me out from behind cover and into the path of bullets. Elsewhere, I’ve been standing near cover and I tried to go into a prone position (because I needed to avoid bullets) and nothing would happen until I took a step to the side and the game then arbitrarily decided that I was good to duck.

While the game technically works just fine a lot of the time, especially once you adapt to its regrettable quirks, there’s a difference between merely working and actually providing a worthwhile experience. Warfighter settles for the former, both in its single-player campaign and in the multiplayer modes (which are on a separate disc that you’ll see first when you open up the case). As I played online, I would find the corpses of slain allies and enemies floating in the air, or I’d try to head down a trail and find that I wasn’t allowed to because apparently what looked like an open pathway was actually an obstacle. Even the presentation is just confusing enough that you really have to pay attention to even figure out how the different classes work, or how to assign upgrades to guns, or what upgrades you might aim for as your character progresses. I gave up on trying to make heads or tails of it rather quickly. I’m more into single-player stuff, anyway.

In the end, Medal of Honor: Warfighter simply doesn’t feel like a product that was ready to ship. There are some good ideas here, and I think that with more time a team of capable developers—and I include the folks at Danger Close in that number—would possibly have allowed the concept to morph into a more worthwhile game. As-is, the title feels like a copy-paste job gone bad. You could certainly do worse than to give it a shot, but you also have enough superior options right now that your time is better spent elsewhere.

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Staff review by Jason Venter (October 29, 2012) Jason Venter has been playing games for 30 years, since discovering the Apple IIe version of Mario Bros. in his elementary school days. Now he writes about them, here at HonestGamers and also at other sites that agree to pay him for his words.