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Games - Medal of Honor to be like EA's Call of Duty?

Medal of Honor Game image provided by Evil Controllers

Spending a lot of my time with Halo: Reach and other gaming distractions, I'm left to decipher the opinions of others when it comes to Medal of Honor. EA has obviously spent an incredible amount of money advertising this franchise, but even if this Medal of Honor turns out not to be that great, it won't all be superfluous. To be clear, EA hasn't spent money on just this game, they've spent the marketing dollars on a blitz to revive the name, the juggernaut, the franchise for the inevitable Medal of Honor 2.

Reviews across the board are giving this game an adequate score. Metacritic.com, which aggregates review scores, informs us that Medal of Honor is a 75 out of 100, that's a C. I haven't received one of those since before I started trying in my second year of college. I dislike Metacritic as much as the next hardcore hippie gamer, but a game like Medal of Honor is marketed for the exact kind of people that would use Metacritic in the first place, and a 75 can't be what EA wants them to see. People are losing their jobs and the guys in charge of press relations are certainly getting assaulted by questions suggesting they don't know how to do their job. But how can they expect an average game to get anything more than an average rating?

EA isn't a new kid on the block, EA's been around for awhile and generally has an answer for everything. They found Resident Evil 4's success to suggest that there was a market for survival horror and gave us Dead Space, then found God of War's market strangely untapped by anyone besides Sony's Entertainment Studios and gave us Dante's Inferno. They find a market they think they can break into and make a game for it. For a game with a triple-A budget, Medal of Honor is being poorly received, at least critically, but most people that play games aren't critics so maybe it won't matter. In anycase, I have problems believing EA wouldn't be ready for this kind of reception.

I'm excited to get my hands on the title itself and see what I think, but I'm guessing EA released this Medal of Honor knowing that it was, "good enough." Good enough, to encourage consumers to pick up Medal of Honor 2 which will recuperate costs from this investment, and which will have more time and polish to be a quality title. From what I've read, this game seems to have problems with it's fundamentals. The campaign has scripted scenarios that can't be altered and at times just don't activate when they should. While the multiplayer suffers from an identity crisis as it tries to implement the best qualities of both Modern Warfare and Battlefield Bad Company 2. For a game that's trying to be a better version of Call of Duty, maybe it's just too much to expect the first attempt to stand a chance, but with what they've spent, I didn't expect them to release a title that has potential for such disappoint.

Written by Evil Ambassador Carlos Reyes