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Review: Medal of Honor: Allied AssaultReviewed By: Kirk Hiner Review Date: July 4, 2002
I have now played the greatest level in computer game history. I'm sure that there will someday be better ones, but I'm hard pressed to think of any before that have matched up to the invasion of Omaha Beach in Aspyr's Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. Allied Assault takes place between 1942 and 1945. The Allied Powers are launching campaigns both massive and covert, and you, as Lt. Mike Powell, are leading the way.
This is mainly due to the angle from which the game is approached. As I mentioned, your character is not some cocky he-man full of banal one liners, he's just a soldier with a soldier's courage, doing what he has to to stay alive. The game's not about killing as many people as you can (although you will kill plenty), it's about finding the best way to achieve your objectives and to protect your fellow soldiers. Unlike most first-person shooters, you're not always alone in Allied Assault. Many of your missions require you to cooperate with AI soldiers who will sometimes amaze you with their resourcefulness but other times confound you with their stupidity. They'll kill enemies you can't even see--watching your back while you snipe Nazis in the distance--but then turn around and charge into rooms full of enemies waiting in ambush. Allied Assault could really benefit from some sort of command system; a couple preset commands you could use to tell your troupes to cover you, retreat, attack, etc. What's more, these soldiers look and sound scared. They behave in a manner realistic to the situation. Some show more courage than others, but they all do their job when it comes down to it. When they're injured, they limp. They kneel to conserve stregnth when they're not moving. It made me work that much harder to keep them all alive...something you don't always have to do. Occasionally, guarding friendly soldiers is necessary to complete a level (or at least to get a special medal at mission's end). More often, though, they're just there to help.
Allied Assault uses the traditional WASD method of movement, but doesn't offer the ability to lean around corners. I found this to be an odd development choice considering so much of the game is about sniping enemy soldiers; it's much easier to snipe if you don't have to expose yourself when searching for the enemy. Otherwise, the controls were quite simple to master. The graphics are amazing, but you pretty much need five 1.2GHz processors, 10GB RAM and a combination of three RADEON 8500s and two GeForce 4s to take full advantage of them. I'm running an 867MHz G4 with 640MB RAM and a RADEON 8500, and I still had to set the graphics well below their maximum setting. There's a lot that can be tweaked, and it could take days to find settings that look good on your system but still offer decent performance. You should prepare for some serious tweaking, or content yourself with the default settings the game choses based on your computer's capabilities. But, as I was saying, the graphics are amazing. You know a first-person shooter is something special when even the trees look impressive. They sway in the breeze pretty much as real trees would, and they're composed of many more layers than we've seen in the past. This is especially noticeable when you're trying to peak out from under them to snipe an enemy soldier. To get past the leaves, you often have to expose yourself. Crazy. The graphics go well beyond leaves, though. Weapons puff blue smoke into the air, bugs gather around lights, enemy soldiers sway as they stand at their posts...the details aren't just in the graphics, but also in how the graphics behave. I did get some weirdness in the night missions, though. The eyes of the NPCs that accompanied me would glow much brighter than the rest of their face. It was creepy, kind of like that Twilight Zone episode where the lead character would see his fellow soldiers' face glow brightly just before they died. Had this been done on purpose in Allied Assault, I'd say it was a brilliant reference.
Speaking of that, those Nazis need to learn to shut up. They could've done much more damage if they weren't always yelling to each other, giving away their positions. But hey, at least they shouted in German. I greatly enjoyed not being able to understand a word they said, unlike in Return to Castle Wolfenstein where all the dialogue was translated. I guess for some developers, heavy accents are real enough. While we're talking about realism, how about the way people die in this game? They don't just fly backwards and then disappear, they stagger. They drop to their knees and remain there a bit before either getting back up or falling further. They sometimes try to crawl away. Sound gruesome? It is. But there's also no blood. You can shoot someone at point blank range with your Springfield rifle and you'll see no blood. This will probably upset the Fangoria crowd, but I barely even noticed. In fact, I welcomed it. This game's already unsettling enough; it doesn't need blood to add to the tone. Now, let's move on to difficulty level. Some levels of Allied Assault are quite simple, others are maddening in their complexity, and both are interchanged throughout. The game doesn't get harder as you progress, it just changes style. I found the sniping missions to be more enjoyable, but that's because they better fit the way I play. When I had a dozen Nazi soldiers charging me, I'd have to play the level countless times to get through it. When I could sneak around and shoot the enemies clandestinely, I found it to be more fun. Of course, save for the Sniper's Last Stand level. In this, you have to snipe snipers. You not only have to keep yourself alive, but three other soldiers as well if you want to be awarded a medal at mission's end. You have to make your way through a town of bombed out buildings, each of which is an excellent hideout for the snipers who aren't taking too kindly to your presence. Save early. Save often.
The developers did something wonderful, though. Right after that level, they put you in a King Tiger tank. The snipers are still there, but now it's just a matter of running them over or blasting them with the tank's cannon. It's a great way to release the frustration of the previous level. Well done. Of course, there's no way to release the frustration of trying to exfiltrate Die Sturmgewehr base. Make sure the family's either away with the relatives or they're comfortable with the more colorful vulgarities, because you'll be shouting plenty of them. Or, you could try a cheat code. It's okay. Sooner or later, we all use them. And then there's Omaha Beach. This level left me stunned. Simply stunned. From start to finish, it was the most intense, atmospheric action I've ever seen in a computer game. It begins with a cut scene of you in a landing boat with your fellow soldiers. You're already being shot at (but can't yet get hit), other boats are being destroyed, and everyone's scared. The NPCs actually look frightened. Sometimes they look right at you, and you can just tell they don't think they're going to make it. Fabulous work for a computer game. Before you land, you can hear one of the soldiers whispering quietly in the background. Beneath all the shelling, it sounds as if he's praying to Jesus. It was chilling. It was real.
Now, here's where I'd normally discuss the multiplayer component, but there's really no point. This game is obviously about the single player action, and the multiplayer games just seemed tacked on. If you want great WWII multiplayer action, check out Return to Castle Wolfenstein. I mentioned before that Allied Assault requires a lot of system power, but it's worth reiterating. I set mostly everything above average, and occasionally the game would stutter for a few seconds. For the most part, this wasn't a problem; it only seemed to happen when I was entering new areas. At one point in the game, however, the game slowed to what had to have been less than five frames per second. Honestly. And, it was during an intense fight sequence, making it practically impossible to get through. The game played that slowly for a couple minutes, and saving and restarting wouldn't help. It wasn't until I made it through the big fight (using the aforementioned cheat code) that I started getting acceptable performance. Lowering the video settings probably would've helped, but I'm not about to constantly fiddle with the settings throughout a game. Allied Assault only unexpectedly quit on me once, and I didn't get any weird graphics anomalies...well, save for the ones you always get. Soldiers' bodies would often disappear into the landscape, and, at one point, a Nazi's head fell back into a toilet. It was quite fitting. I did seem to have a problem with running, though. No matter how I set up the controls, Mike Powell would move at the same speed whether or not I was holding the walk key. I've decided he must've been walking the whole time, since there were some explosives from which I couldn't escape without taking damage. Perhaps that's why I had so much trouble with Die Sturmgewehr base. Maybe I wasn't supposed to try to kill everyone, I was just supposed to outrun them. Regardless, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault is a fantastic game that finally--finally--makes an attempt to portray war in a realistic, human way. In doing so, it ends up being much more fun the celebratory war games we usually get. I guess it's only fitting, therefore, that I post this review on the day in which we American's celebrate our country's freedom...from England? On second thought, maybe it's not all that fitting at all.  [an error occurred while processing this directive]
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See? In the synopsis, we already know we're getting a special game. Mike Powell. Your character's name is Mike Powell. Not Max Payne or Duke Nukem or Sgt. Happy Killer Guy. Mike Powell. He's a normal guy, not a super hero. Not a crass caricature of a maniacal solider who thinks war is just a whole hell of a lot of fun. In fact, if anything, Allied Assault is out to prove that war is anything but fun. As a result, the game is one of the most enjoyable first persons shooters I've ever played.
Allied Assault contains an amazingly diverse collection of levels. In some, you're under heavy attack and have to launch an all out assault to survive. In others, you have to silently snipe your way through besieged towns or dark forests. In yet others, you have to disguise yourself as a Nazi officer to infiltrate bases and steal plans. All of them are challenging in their own way, and a couple are well nigh impossible. More on that in a bit.
Perhaps even more impressive is the audio. The musical score is phenomenal. It's in turn energetic, melancholy, creepy, and triumphant. It's exactly what a war soundtrack should be. The guns sound real, not exaggerated as usual. The ambient sounds are effective as well, especially in the Siegfried forest where all you can hear is the breeze, the trees cracking as they sway in the wind, the howls of wolves (coyotes?) in the distance, and the startling sound of Nazi shouts as they find you.
The trick is to see them before they see you, but moving about that slowly pretty much destroys the flow of the game. Other sites have suggested walking forward until being shot, seeing from where the shots are being fired, then reloading a saved game and targeting that area. Me? I let a walkthrough point out where everyone is. Even still, the level took forever and I had to restore dozens of times.
Then, the boat door opens and all hell breaks loose. For the next five to ten minutes, you'll be under constant fire from the bunkers at the top of the beach. Soldiers all around you will die, and you will too until you figure out how to use the landscape to your advantage. When you finally make it to the bunker and kill the Nazis inside, there's a brief period where you can watch your allies storming the beach unmolested. It's a nice moment towards the end of a fantastic level.