review: Everyone would want to play Saving Private Ryan’s Daniel Jackson; the sharpshooter’s
superhuman efficiency under pressure guaranteed it. And I’m sure the private’s last stand was
on Steven Spielberg’s mind as the director inked the DreamWorks Interactive deal that put Medal of Honor on shelves in 1999, one year after Ryan’s box-office debut. Only, when Jackson’s Springfield rifle went click-clack-boom, somebody died. When I shoot Jerry, he as often as not does a jack-in-thebox number.
Games drawn from history don’t have to be realistic. This isn’t that argument. Saving Private Ryan took liberties with the truth, too, though the difference is that of Jackson forgetting to rezero his rifle sights and still shooting a German sniper straight through his own scope, and Medal of Honor: Airborne’s Gestapo men who step from a train, firing MG42s from the hip like jackbooted John J. Rambos. But Spielberg’s war movie, alongside HBO miniseries Band of Brothers, established today’s authenticity trend—to the extent that anything less looks like yesterday’s kitsch. And MOH certainly isn’t advertised as a John Wayne film, let alone a Captain
America comic. As Brothers in Arms and Call of Duty challenge MOH by inching further along the believability spectrum, it’s impossible to imagine an anonymous EA level designer sneaking the Red Skull and assorted superstormtroopers into the game—while, elsewhere, advertising material touts the studio’s “commitment to historical accuracy and authenticity.” However it happens, the people marketing the game aren’t making it, and—just maybe—aren’t even playing it. That’s too bad, though; Airborne is a good game.
As in any arcade punch-athon, paratrooper Boyd Travers tops off his health bar by walking into
flashing power-ups (first-aid tins rather than roast poultry). And as in role-playing games, repeated use improves weapon proficiency. In the same way that Airborne transforms German flak towers into a daring assault on one the size of the Death Star, it turns the fact that real GIs often modified guns in the field into rifles that fire faster and more accurately after scoring umpteen bull’s-eyes. Pure bulls***, in other words…but worth buying, so to speak, because the
carrot is enticing enough. Similarly, Airborne’s standout feature—land where you will and fight your way through objectives in whatever order you want—is less about reliving history than saving a sagging series for which decision-making has meant “where to shoot” and “what to shoot with.” Touching down on steeples and rathaus rooftops isn’t suicide; it’s a viable tactic in a campaign that, to its credit, often feels more like a multiplayer match—death doesn’t mean doovers so much as another drop zone, a different approach—even if your A.I. allies won’t win the war without you.
YOU AGAIN
Really, though, you aren’t supposed to stop shooting, and you’re not supposed to note anything other than whether Jerry’s in your sights, since seams show the second you do: fake and glitchy fights, an officer waving infantry forward though he’s inside and all alone, tanks whose turrets are already traversed to fire the split second you poke out of a window. Whether or not his movement is tactically meaningful, what matters is that the enemy is ever on the move, hesitating long enough to let you zap his helmet off now and then. Here, Airborne triumphs, as Axis and Allies alike race every which way, charging and retreating through Sicilian villas, concrete coastal emplacements, and bomb-shattered streets engineered to encourage frantic exchanges. But lifting a lesson from Call of Duty could’ve boosted Airborne further beyond average (“We’d see games jump around from theater to theater—the kind of thing you see just before a genre jumps the shark,” producer Patrick Gilmore writes in EA’s review guide, seemingly slamming Infinity Ward’s shooter for recognizing Russia’s role in the Second World War, and unaware that MOH: European Assault, too, did just that). In COD, the single rifle round or submachine-gun burst that strikes center mass is lethal—more a matter of capitalizing on the satisfaction that comes from prioritizing targets and taking them out one after another than degree of challenge. In contrast, Medal of Honor bots sop bullets, so instead of swinging your sights from Hun to Hun, you linger over each, expecting those you hadn’t shot through the skull to rise like Lazarus—or Wolfenstein zombies—an outcome neither “realistic” nor good for the game.
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