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Review: Medal of Honor Allied Assault: Spearhead Expansion PackReviewed By: Kirk Hiner Review Computer: 867MHz G4, 640MB RAM, ATI RADEON 8500, Mac OS X v10.2.6 Review Date: June 16, 2003
War is hell, but it inspires good poetry. Know what else is hell? A completely pointless, selfish kind of hell? Waiting for the game you want to review. Hardly a day goes by when the UPS and FedEx vans don't roll into the Applelinks Towers loading dock C with a bunch of new stuff for us to review. The games all get routed directly to my office, and I open them with glee even if I have no time to review them. I look at the return address and quickly try to recall what games have been released by that company.
Then, usually on a day when I'm out of the office taking in 18 holes with our clients at the local mini-golf establishment, the game for which I've been waiting arrives and I have to wait another entire day before I can get back to the office and play it. Finally, Spearhead. I call my wife and tell her I'll be home late that evening, she tells me I won't be, that I'll be home by 6 p.m. and that I'm buying her dinner at Outback Steakhouse, and I do it with the condition that she entertains the dog afterwards so I can play the game. She relents, we get home from the restaurant, and I finally get to... ...read poetry? Yep. As the game was installing, I took the time to go through the manual to refresh myself on the controls, and I found myself spending more time reading the poems at the end of the manual. I normally don't like poetry, but these poems were moving and well written. Good poetry is extremely difficult to write (does no one understand meter anymore?), so I was impressed. I was even more impressed when, at the end of each completed mission, the poems were read to me. Were they read by the actual authors? I don't know, but the interpretations were chilling, especially considering what I'd just been through in the game.
Oddly, for a game based on the actual strategies and elements of war, the multiplayer function was lacking. Perhaps it just paled in comparison to that of Return to Castle Wolfenstein, but it left me wanting more. Nearly a year later, I finally have more. Before we get to that, though, let's take a look at the single player component. Medal of Honor Allied Assault: Spearhead brings nine new single-player levels to the war. They start out wonderfully, with your character, Sgt. Jack Barnes, parachuting deep into occupied France. Aboard the plane, the soldiers' anticipation and fear is captured just as well as it was before landing on Omaha Beach in Allied Assault. As you jump, planes explode, comrades get shot in the air, and you eventually fall through the roof of a house. Oddly, the game settles down at this point and only picks back up in certain spots. Not nearly as intense as Omaha Beach.  This is good, however, in a couple of ways. I greatly prefer the levels in which strategy plays a larger part than firepower. Whereas a few levels in Spearhead require you to run about madly, killing everything that moves, most are about finding cover, locating your target, and figuring out how to eliminate it. Some levels give you comrades for support, but these guys don't always use their head. I guess that's how it would've been in real life, too, but I would prefer if there was some way you could give commands to the NPCs...at least on the levels where you are, in fact, supposed to be in command. Oh, and a piece of advice; when your commanding officer gives you an order in this game, I recommend you do it. There are new weapons here, but anyone who's read my reviews before knows how many figs I give about weapons. I don't care if my gun was made in Russia or in England, just as long as it keeps me alive. The only time the weapons feel any different to me is when I'm shooting them out of the back of a jeep or from the top of a tank, both of which you will do in this game. Those are the intense levels about which I spoke earlier, the ones that really didn't work, but I'll cover that in a bit, after I get through multiplayer.
Know what else I'd like? Cooperative single player gaming. I guess that's a contradiction in terms, but you know what I mean. The single player levels would be much more tense and much more interesting if you had an actual friend instead of a just a computer controlled character helping you along. In both the single and multiplayer levels, Spearhead sounds great. More accurately, it sounds absolutely amazing. I can't vouch for the accuracy of the audio effects, having never been shot at myself, but I can vouch for their effectiveness. Everything from guns being loaded to bullets splitting tree bark to the rattle of approaching heavy artillery sounds as it should...or at least as it should according to the war movies I've seen. When you're being attacked from all sides and you hear a tank approaching, you can't help but panic. Fantastic.
Or, maybe they were. Maybe Apple gave them their new top-of-the-line systems, and they just forgot that most gamers don't get the luxury of updating their computers every time Apple announces a MHz bump. I can understand wanting to take advantage of the latest technology, but when minimizing every single video option to its lowest possible setting doesn't help, even on a machine well above the recommended minimum settings, then something is seriously wrong. That being said, there's enough in Spearhead to compel gamers through even the unplayable levels. The game eventually does settle back down, and it becomes fun again. Oh, and hey, I just read in the credits that Gary Oldman plays the voice of Sergeant Jack Barnes. I guess that explains it. All the Q&A money went to pay him. You know, I wonder if I could get him to read a couple of my favorite poems. There's this one I really like about a man from Nantucket...  [an error occurred while processing this directive]
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Cool Mac Gear• iPod 1G-2G • iPod 3G • iPod 4G • iPod Mini • PowerBook-iBook • Keyboard Skins • Garageband
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Aspyr? Yes, Spearhead! Please may it be Spearhead!! Wait...what's this? Tony Hawk? Eh, this goes to Bill. Spy Hunter. Erica? No, not until we buy her a computer that can handle it. Send this to Bill, too. Harry and the Chamber Potter of Secrets? Bill. He likes that crap. Blood Rayne? Bill's into vampires, he'd dig this game. But, well, I've given him too much already. I'll take it. But Spearhead. Where's Spearhead?
Spearhead itself is the first Macintosh expansion pack to Aspyr's 
Twelve new multiplayer maps have been added along with one new game type: Tug of War. In Tug of War, each team is given up to five objectives that need to be completed in order to win. This and the Round Based Game (players who are eliminated cannot return until the round is over) were my favorites as they were the ones that seemed to best capture the spirit of the game. It seems to me that war is about two things: staying alive and accomplishing objectives. Death matches really serve no purpose here, I don't think. In fact, I would still like to see the developers explore this aspect further. Don't even give us rounds, just kick us off the server once we're killed. Make it that fatal. Give different players different specialties. Not that good at fragging people? No worries. Be a medic. You don't have to kill anyone, you just have to avoid being killed while bringing aid to your teammates. Still the enhancements in the multiplayer component of Spearhead mainly center around improving the team-based play, and they were quite welcome.
I would say the same thing for the graphics, but the detail there hurt it tremendously. I recall a couple bits in Allied Assault where the framerates dropped too much, but it happened too often in Spearhead. In one level in particular, it was unforgivable. Even after I lowered the video settings as far as they could go, I still got little more than three or four frames per second. Honestly, it was that bad. Aiming was impossible. Indeed, seeing anything was impossible. I figured I could just turn on the cheat mode and get through it, but no. It was one of those levels where you had to cover another vehicle, so it wasn't just about staying alive. Finding the enemy at such low framerates was hard enough, and eliminating them before they could kill your comrades became a matter of pure luck. I don't know what the Q&A people were doing when these levels were being tested, but they certainly weren't anywhere near their computers.