Medal of Honor European Assault GameCube Review

Electronic Arts certainly knows how to milk a series and this one is no exception, the title we have for you today is Medal of Honour European Assault. Continuing in the same vein as previous titles, European assault is set back in war time. You play as William Holt, a lieutenant in the US Army, hand-picked by William ‘wild bill’ Donovan to be among the first field agents in the newly formed Office of Strategic Service – OSS. The game takes you through a linear set of missions in Europe. You will take in places such as Russia, St Naziarre and even Africa.

Gameplay

The gameplay in MOHEA never really changes throughout the levels apart from getting a bit more challenging towards the end. The basic pattern of each level is to complete a set number of goals in order to obtain a medal, the more goals you achieve the better the medal is, for example one mission sees you needing to complete 4 goals for a bronze medal, but complete all goals and you will collect a gold medal. Pressing “start” will bring up the goal list showing what you have to do. Some goals will not be shown until you stumble upon a moment in the game in which they appear, one problem I have with this is that sometimes the game will have you aimlessly moving around looking for something you have no idea where it can be found. Every mission also contains goals that are the same. For example every mission has a “nemesis” which you must kill in order to complete that goal, every single one is a German soldier. Another set goal is that you have to collect documents which are normally found on the nemesis one beaten, To start with I found this quite good but after a while it becomes tedious and boring to do the same thing over and over again. The big addition to the game that has been talked up by EA is the “adrenaline mode”, it works like this. After hitting a set number of things your adrenaline bar fills up, when it reaches the top you can enter adrenaline mode. This consists of everything slowing down so you can shoot anything in sight, you don’t lose any ammo or any life. Its hardly innovation as its clearly just been nicked from “the matrix”, bullet time anyone.

Graphics

The part of the game that has come in for the most stick is the graphics, Mainly because they have no flair to them. Across all the consoles the game looks distinctly average, certainly not something you would expect from a game in the late stages of the current generation. The textures are very plain and nothing special, the game does have good drew distances but nothing that again you wouldn’t expect. EA have always been known for never excelling in the graphics area of a game but for a title that relies on realism it is a bit of a let down. The load times as well aren’t that great, I played this on the GameCube and it still took about 10 seconds to load a level, nothing to write home about in this generation. The frame rate for the most part is nice and steady, but when there is a lot of action on screen is will sometimes stutter, but for the most is ok.

Sound

If there is one part of the game that I liked the most it would definitely be the sound department. As soon as you load the game up you can tell that EA pulled out all the stops for the sound of the game, as soon as the “THX” logo appears. From the sound of bullets firing to the groans of soldiers being shot it all sounds so realistic, definitely one of the pluses in the game for me.

Lifespan

If you are a newbie to FPS this could take you anything up to 10 hours to complete, there are several difficulty modes to complete, with each one the number of revives and med kits available diminish. Once you’ve done the single player you can have always a go at the multiplayer, which consists of split screen action. There are several modes to choose from such as “face to face”, “nemesis” and “king of the hill” plus many more. Multiplayer is a nice addition if nothing special.

Overview

Medal of Honour European Assault is a game that does enough without ever excelling, The graphics are average at best and the gameplay is nothing spectacular, That being said the sound in the game is top notch and the lifespan can be quite long if you take advantage of the multiplayer and complete all the difficulty levels. For me It looks like EA has targeted this game at Newbie Fps players, which is a shame has the scope for the game was immense, maybe with a little more development time EA could have really produced a killer title here for perhaps the last Medal Of Honour on the current gen of consoles.

7.5 out of 10