70%PC

Medal of Honor was first and it was a smash hit when it first came out in 1999. Then along came Activision in 2003 with Call of Duty and kicked MoH off its perch. MoH games have struggled to find favour since then, but it hasn’t stopped them churning out the games. Airborne does need a PhysX download to run on a modern rig (like several games pre-2007), but it's a 2 minute fix and then it runs fine. It's easy to google this, but I'm happy to help if you have a problem.

Airborne is the 13th game in the series that has stuck resolutely to a World War 2 setting throughout and there is much that looks impressive about this iteration. It has some neat new mechanics and halfway through turns into Wolfenstein with the appearance of gatling gun toting SS officers that lumber towards you as the biggest bullet sponges on any fps as you try to grenade an armoured Nazi train. Great stuff. There are six missions to take on, each divided into about a dozen sub missions. Each main mission is in a varied location from, an Architectural site, an Italian Hilltop town, assaulting a massive flak tower and supporting the D-Day landings from a behind-the-lines drop. It’s a great campaign and a satisfying one to complete.

The graphics are still great looking for a game that is 13 years old, although the draw distance and rifle sniping is poorer than expected. Levels are constructed in a semi-linear fashion that means you can take on any part of them in any order to progress to the end section. Likewise the health system takes on a semi-regenerative format, with your health bar divided into four sections. It depletes as normal upon receiving hits but if you reach cover before a section is completely erased then that section will regenerate. Beyond that you need health packs, strewn about in the normal fashion to restore lost health bar sections.

The game takes place entirely on foot and each mission (and restart from death) takes place with a parachute drop that enables you to decide where in the combat zone to land and begin (or continue) your fight. Other developments include an upgrade system on the weapons that is triggered when you make set amounts of kills with that weapon.

These elements mostly work well. The upgrading of the weapons give secondary forte capabilities and improved scoping and such things, that do improve your ability. Each weapon can only be upgraded three times and this does lend some replayability to the game as you can experiment with using and upgrading different weapons, it also encourages you to vary your gameplay as you work through the game. However the parachuting, fun at first, does become tedious as a method of restart. I appreciate that it enables a restart choice, but even that is limited, you can only choose within a set circle of descent...so what’s the point? Add to this that Airborne still uses a checkpoint system to restart when saving, there is no quick save. So this new function is like a good idea stifled. Whilst the partial regenerative health bar works well the partially linear levels do not always. If you miss clearing out a machine gun post and progress all the way through the level you will be met with nothing to find/do to progress and find yourself having to traipse back through the whole level to find the one thing you forgot to destroy that will enable progress. This is deeply annoying and a direct consequence of the semi-linear design. It’s almost as if the devs had a bunch of good ideas and were held back in their implementation of them. Another problem is that if you die a few times at certain points you end up having to complete sections with sometimes only one other ally to help you...when you died there were perhaps half a dozen helping you and now not. Of course this makes things vastly more difficult and turns the occasional section into a repetitive grind to get to the next checkpoint and the game seems to reset the spawning of buddies to fight alongside.

The balance of the game is good despite a reasonably high retirement rate of 5% on Howlongtobeat.com, but it seems that almost no one plays this game which is a shame, because it is worth your time, despite the frustrations with it. Medal of Honor games have always been the tough guys CoD and represent a greater difficulty than that genre, so if you can look past the glitches and old school checkpoints, this is a game worth checking out.