Friday 6 August 2010

Medal of Honour : BETA

I was lucky enough to get a BETA code for MOH from a fellow tester and fired it up straight away. Right it seems DICE have been busy. On offer are 2 maps that radically differ in look and gameplay. 1st up is" MISSION", now this is as close to RUSH mode on BC as you can get but instead of a stupid box or flag there are real objectives like a roadblock,AA guns,Machine gun nests etc . . . to capture, blow up and destroy. This plays like BC RUSH as in that a new area opens up as you progress past the old one but at a faster pace and it looks far superior to BC with lots of debris and rubbish fluttering about and more undulation to the terrain. Then we move onto "Team Assault" which basically is EA/DICE going CALL OF DUTY. Thats it really, its just COD with the Frostbite game engine.It has simply been designed to capture all the COD fanboys away from Activision and to ease them gently into the Battlefield Universe. Square / Rectangular playing areas with 2 story buildings, chokepoint alleys, Market stalls, little camping holes,random grenade deaths on the random spawns as areas are dominated pushing you to the otherside of the map . . . Sound familiar ???
And there lies the problem . . . what we have is just COD mk II with a little tease for the BC fans with theBattlefield styled Mission game mode. Personally i wish they had released this as a BC2 add on pack with new characters set in the Heldmund valley. Its just doesnt feel like a new game just a stop gap till Battlefield III is released next year and some competion for Treyarch's forthcoming COD : BLACK OPS in the autumn.
Dont get me wrong this looks awesome and when cleaned up will be a serious title and very easily kick COD in the nuts due to it having the different game modes. lets hope for more upgrades and a veritable feast of maps with release.
In the meantime the beta is running like crap, its glitchy, weapons feel unresponsive, you lock up and crash, no indication of ranking up, too much sprite collison as you walk thru walls, rubberbanding about . . . . yeah i know its a beta but this plays like an Alpha build, very rough and ready. But when its working smooth you can see the potential it has.Its gonna take a lot of cleaning up and polishing before release. 1 other thing thats bugging me . . . do we really need this game ? BF Vietnam is coming a month later . . . . .
ALSO . . . if there are 20'000 codes available how come there is never more than 900 people playing online . . i smell BULLSHIT. Come on EA just give the beta away like a Demo on marketplace and lets have some fun.