military and espionage

I am a Medal Of Honor junkie. I beat Allied Assult in 3 days and Spearhead in 2. Allied Assult was great, Spearhead was awful. The EA games at the beginning showed that it wouldn't be the same as Allied Assult. It was much worse than I thought it would be. The levels were harder so you had to play them over and over til you beat them. There were fewer levels because of this. Breakthrough was different. Despite being obviously shorter it took the same time to beat as Allied Assult. The game play was better and there was actually a plot. The game had a few sound problems but otherwise it went fine. The new weapons were cool especially the Vickers Berthier. The first level, the Kasserine Pass previewed the rest of the game and I new it would be good after that level. If your one of the people that said they wouldn't buy another Medal Of Honor after buying Spearhead, take it back before you look stupid.

This is an enjoyable expansion, but no more. It plays a lot like the original Medal of Honor, which is a very good thing. For some reason, MoH always has been the first person shooter I enjoyed more than all the others. I am not sure why, but things just seem right. One just has this feeling of "being there" (which is often pretty scary!), rather than the feeling that you are playing a game. Within limits of course.

So I am happy about the gameplay. Of course one has to realize that MoH now is a pretty old game, and as with all expansions, one should not expect a massive technology upgrade. I am sure, this will happen with the next MoH, but it certainly hasn't happened here.

Also, this game seems to be lacking some of those big, impressive moments that the original game and also (to some extent) spearhead had. This expansion tries to create these great, scripted events and it succeeds better than most other games, but certainly not as well as the previous MoH games.

The AI could be smarter, but I haven't noticed any real bad issues like some of the other reviewers seem to have encountered. Once again, things seem to be at the level they were at the original game, which was impressive then, and isn't quite as impressive now.

Time-wise, it is a bit short. I played through it in a (long) evening. That doesn't bother me too much though. It was an evening of fun, I lived through some tense moments, and I do not have to spend the whole weekend on this... ;-)

I don't really share the opinion of fellow reviewers that this is overly hard. I didn't have too much of a problem playing through this, which may in part be due to the great save-everywhere system. Sometimes there are a lot of enemies, but don't freak out and just go after them one by one. I do agree that the supply of ammo is a bit short. The same is true for first-aid packs. Tip: Try to open doors and check out basements, even if they are not along your main route. Every now and then, it pays of.

I did encounter a crash-bug in the very last mission, that crashed the game to the desktop 3 or 4 times at a similar spot. At that mission, I also encountered some frame-rate issues. Hmmm... that's a bit disappointing. Luckily, this wasn't too much of a problem, once again, thanks to the save-game system. I also noticed that the collision detection is not all that great. Sometimes you shoot into an obstacle that should really not be in the way as far as one can tell visually. I also once or twice saw a machine gun stick through the wall, giving away the position of an enemy. And once a soldier just walked through the wall, although I think he actually came through the door and was just clipped out incorrectly. Anyway: None of these issues were too much of a problem, but one would have expected a bit more polish from EA.

As a computer gamer of 30 years (you read that right), I found this to be the most frustrating piece of crappy software gaming I've ever played. If you enjoy playing one scene over and over and over and OVER until you finally figure out that you have to first do thing 1 before you do thing 2 (and it doesn't have to be something logical), then this is for you. It's one thing to be challenging, but this game takes it over the top. Ridiculous.

Spend your money on Call of Duty - EXCELLENT!