Medal of Honor: Warfighter Review (360 Version)

This is a difficult review to write for many reasons.  On the one hand, it is important to be fair to developers who put hundreds if not thousands of hours into building the games that we play.  It is equally important to hold developers accountable for selling products that don't meet the expectations of consumers when they are spending hard earned cash for them.  With that in mind, I will say that I really wanted to like Medal of Honor: Warfighter. 

I gave the troublesome beta the benefit of the doubt when it released even though it largely failed to promote any sort of confidence in the fact that Warfighter was ready for launch just weeks before its release.  I even chose to ignore the implications of EA's choice to delay releasing review copies to reputable games sites given the fact that the game required a day 1 patch to fix a wide array of campaign and multiplayer issues. Despite all of my best efforts to ignore the signs that Medal of Honor would not meet my expectations, I am forced to admit that Warfighter is simply not a worthy follow up to Medal of Honor's success and critical acceptance in 2010. 

Even after a 2GB HD install.....consoles versions won't look
like this.

Generic is a word that many critics have used to describe Warfighter, but I don't feel that the word appropriately conveys the sense of disappointment that I felt after pouring hours of my time into it.  Many of the first person military shooters that have been released in the last half decade could be called generic for various reasons, but the adjective has become something of a tired excuse for the mediocrity that we as consumers have been stomaching for far too long.

Danger Close does deserve some credit for sticking to their central story telling vein of exploring the soldier's side of war.  However, they kill any sense of connection that players may feel for their story by chopping the plot up into incomprehensible chunks that have been interspersed between sections of maddeningly linear gameplay.  It's not that the story itself is inherently bad, but it's difficult to tell what the story's focus is or to decipher who the characters really are as it plays out. 

The main reason for this confusion is that Warfighter's plot timeline is about as convoluted as they come.  A big part of the central conflict focuses on a downtrodden character code named "Preacher" who along with Dusty, Mother, and Voodoo makes a return from 2010's MoH.  It seems that years of die hard devotion to the cause of the Navy Seals has taken it's toll on Preacher's marriage and on his relationship with his young daughter.  There are some poignant segments that convey Preacher's frustrations with having to choose between his duty as a soldier and his responsibilities as a husband and father, but all of that gets lost somewhere after the halfway point of the campaign's progression. 

The gameplay is as lifeless as my eyes.

From that point forward, the actions of Preacher's unit become harder and harder to follow as they bounce from location to location trying to track down mystery suppliers who are distributing a deadly substance referred known as PETN to terrorist cells across the globe.  The real trick then becomes deciphering who exactly the Tier 1 operators are fighting against from segment to segment or what their objective is.  Even as the game reached its conclusion, I had to ask myself why I was chasing a man that had only been shown once before over the duration of the campaign, and how did I come to face him in the first place?

Amidst all of this mess, there were several segments that felt forced into the game's continuity just for the sake of being there.  One scene puts you behind the scope of one of the Navy Seals who ended the infamous Somali Pirate standoff in which a cargo ships captain was held captive for several hours.  The scene is immediately recognizable and lasts for no more than a few minutes, but after I was left scratching my head as to why it was included to begin with.

Sadly, the story is not the only component that leaves Warfighter wanting.  To say that the gameplay experience is linear would be an insult to Warfighter's well paced and notably linear competition in this genre.  Every instance and action sequence is scripted in a way that there is really only one way to progress through the game.  During regular shooting segments, every enemy must be killed or players will face a mission failed screen or otherwise be killed themselves. 

Danger Close mercifully kept the on rails segments to no more than 2 or 3 this time around, but that doesn't change the fact that these segments were so dry and uninteresting that one scene where I was manning a mounted grenade launcher on a zodiac water craft prompted me to see what would happen simply refused to touch the trigger at all.  The result was that, aside from soaking up a few shots from enemy soldiers, I survived the event with no effort whatsoever.

Warfighter's gameplay doesn't suffer from broken controls or maddening campaign glitches, and most of the campaign scenery is well rendered with the use of the Frostbite 2 engine, but there's absolutely nothing interesting about it despite it's visual flair.  Most, if not all, of the now common place military FPS mechanics used in popular titles are used in this game, but they are used so frequently that by the end of the game you would rather smash your hand repeatedly with your controller than prompt another slow motion breach maneuver in game.

Online multiplayer doesn't do much to soothe the pangs of buyers remorse over Warfighter's $59.99 price tag as it presents a number of its own technical and compositional issues.  Warfighter features a persistent ranking and unlock system that can be accessed in game or through EA's battlelog website.  Unfortunately, the unlock system suffers from two main problems.  The first is that the upgrade process is over complicated by Warfighter's in game menu system.  Viewing earned unlocks requires filtering down through separate menus for each individual unlock category.  To make things worse, unlocks are exclusive to whatever faction and nationality you happened to be playing as when you achieved them thereby adding an additional step to the player configuration process.

The second issue is that the unlocks themselves aren't that interesting or game changing enough to keep players interested in the grind.  From the outset, each faction and class is equipped with a default weapon which plays to the strong suits of that given class.  Different nationalities carry different stat bonuses such as increased stealth and stamina, but the classes all have the same special abilities and kill streak bonuses.  As you use your selected characters, points accumulate that can be used to unlock weapon parts and camouflage, but those augmentations don't do much in terms of improving weapon performance.

Other mods such as magazine alternatives are purely cosmetic, and do little to justify grinding out points to unlock them.  It was hard to get around the fact that the menu system is complicated to navigate, but I do admit that I haven't logged in to the battlelog site to explore configurations on that end.  Perhaps that system is more user friendly.

Multiplayer offers a number of different game types that are very reminiscent of most of those found in Battlefield 3 or Call of Duty, but poor map design ensures that most matches will be decided by how well or how quickly either team controls choke points and well known camping spots.  I'm not how Warfighter's server architecture is set up, or if my particular connection was just being finicky, but I have also experienced an inordinate number of lag deaths during matches of every type.  One moment I will be running down a corridor when I notice I am taking fire from an enemy.  As usual, I round a corner to escape harm, but just as I think I'm safe to turn and face my attacker.....I'm dead. 

A similar issue plagued Battlefield 3 in its early days where rubber band lag often reset players to previous positions when their connection slowed, but I don't recall experiencing as many unexplained deaths from that particular issue in the past.  The issue is exasperated by the fact that downing opponents seems to take an inordinate number of well placed shots with most weapons when the system makes you believe that fewer of your enemies shots will kill you. 

In summary, Medal of Honor Warfighter ticks far too many boxes off in the negative column for me to keep coming back for more.  The single player campaign fails to capitalize on any of the successes that its predecessor pulled off well enough to make it a viable alternative in 2010, and the multiplayer suite puts up too many frustrating roadblocks to provide a satisfying long term diversion from what will most likely be another banner release year for Activision's Call of Duty series. 

When I think back on how much flack I gave titles like Homefront for presenting lackluster campaigns, I have to give those releases credit for at least providing an enjoyable multiplayer experience.  Sadly, the same cannot be said for Medal of Honor Warfighter.  I can't help wondering how much external influence may have interfered with the production of this game with reports in past weeks stating that the controversial Zero Dark Thirty map pack was pushed heavily by EA as the development team didn't want to build it, but at the same time I can't clear Danger Close from blame for how this game turned out.

Medal of Honor (2010) still managed to be enjoyable despite the fact that it was formulaic, and there were questionable design decisions in regard to the division of labor behind creating the campaign and online portions of the game.  For these reasons, I don't doubt that Danger Close was capable of making a memorable successor with Warfighter, but this was not it.  There is always the chance that downloadable content and software patches may help save the multiplayer in coming weeks, but I will most likely be returning to my older FPS catalogue to satisfy my online gaming needs.


Overall Score: 2 out of 5 (stick a fork in it....I'm done)