Most campaigns use them once or twice in order to provide something a little different, though these days it’s becoming tacky in its overuse. Any player of military FPS games should be familiar with breaching - you stand outside a door, kick it open, toss in a flashbang, and then pop off the startled enemies in slow-motion. Most egregious of all is the fact that door breaching is now championed as the prime feature of the experience. Bullets are fired, people fall over screaming, but ultimately nothing memorable occurs, and nothing changes from that first shot fired to that last generic terrorist killed. For the five or six hours the campaign lasts, not once does anything actually happen in it. The stakes never feel high and the action never heats up, because nothing ever happens. As seems to be increasingly common with games of this nature, there’s no sense of pacing or tension. Every single level plays out the same way, albeit with different (yet wholly familiar) setpieces.īoasting a cover system that barely works, the action of Warfighter gets stale within the first few minutes and never freshens up, as players pick their fragile way from chest-high wall to chest-high wall, popping off the clairvoyant - yet nonetheless stupid - enemies who are one scream of “Durka Durka” away from becoming Team America stereotypes. Outside of such momentary flickers of newness, the rest of the game is a one-note song droned repeatedly from beginning to end. Sadly, they are but brief flashes of respite among a brown sea of brown guns firing brown bullets in brown deserts. They’re not exactly exciting, but they’re something else, and that’s all that matters. A couple of car chases, one of which becomes a surprisingly effective vehicular stealth challenge, manage to offer welcome sanctuary from the rest of the story’s relentless shooting gallery. In fairness, there are a few brief glimmers of originality, mostly coming from those levels where shooting isn’t part of the action.
Warfighter seems content to just go through the motions with most of its campaign, copying entire scenarios from its own reboot, as well as Battlefield and Call of Duty, to create a set of missions that feel like the videogame equivalent of a TV series clip show. The campaign takes players on a tour through familiar and increasingly weary scenarios - there’s the boat level, the city streets, the customary shoot-out in an Arabian village, the moonlit stealth adventure, the sniping section, and the expected helicopter level. Yes, Danger Close, women do exist - but they don’t look like sheets of pink latex pulled taut over a chimpanzee’s skeleton. Worst of all, the game regularly attempts to grab for the heartstrings by introducing a wife and a daughter to one of the interchangeable protagonists - attempts that fail partly because the writing is so corny, and mostly because the character models are horrendously creepy, clearly being designed by artists who have never had to draw females before. In short, it’s a tacky and melodramatic look at military life with a script that could have been trotted out by a twelve-year-old. There is an attempt at a story, featuring characters that make no impression and a villain that appears for no other reason than to be an obligatory foreign bad guy. So linear and formulaic is each mission, it comes across less like the “EXTREME REALISM” of modern combat and more like a cheap, slow fairground ride. For the most part, it’s another common romp through the Middle East and other war-torn parts of the world, as players hide behind crates and shoot at silhouettes spawning across murky arenas of nondescript space.
Crossing off an invisible checklist of must-have features, Warfighter plays it absolutely safe, doing very little to rock the boat, but even less to capture the imagination.įirst things first, the single-player mode is abysmal. In both its single-player campaign and competitive online mode, it is a “Who’s Who” of every overplayed stereotype the genre has to offer. Medal of Honor: Warfighter takes the uniformity of the military FPS to its logical, strained conclusion. Medal of Honor: Warfighter (PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 ) If Warfighter is anything, it’s as gratuitous as it is redundant.
It is, in fact, the perfect name for Danger Close’s latest offering. It is, however, a perfectly fitting name for one of the many annual “me too” military first-person shooters that hit the market toward the end of the year.
It is gratuitously macho, not to mention rather redundant. Yes, “Warfighter” is a term with a real-life military application, but that doesn’t stop it from sounding incredibly silly.
Medal of Honor: Warfighter is a funny name.