Medal of Honor: Heroes Review




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Developer: EA Canada Publisher: Electronic Arts
Release Date: October 23, 2006 Also On: None

Medal of Honor has been one of the most popular first-person shooter franchises since the PlayStation. There have been some bumps along the way, primarily the current-gen Medal of Honor: Rising Sun, which received a dreadful 4.9 out of 10 from Game Freaks 365. Medal of Honor: European Assault successfully bounced the franchise back to prominence with an 8.8 out of 10. Now, a few months before the next-generation PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions, the PlayStation Portable gets it shot.

Being that the PlayStation Portable is touted as a portable PlayStation 2, you would expect a little larger levels than you find here. Granted, while they are open environments, they just do not give you much room to play in. I suppose this is just a trade-off you have to play to eliminate a lot of long load times and the more linear levels that were found in the unsuccessful Rising Sun. Levels may take you as few as five to ten minutes to complete your missions, including all side-missions.

Medal of Honor controls remarkably well for a PlayStation Portable first-person shooter. If you’ve played GUN Showdown for PSP, they are similar to that. The analog nub is used to move your character with the face buttons (triangle, square circle and x) orienting the camera around. Your weapon fires with the right trigger and you can zoom in with the left trigger. Crouching can be accomplished by pushing down on the control pad, reloading with left and switching weapons with right.

The single-player in Medal of Honor: Heroes is only about 15 missions long. You can select from a few different difficulty settings, and the lower you pick, the fewer unlockables you will get, but other than that, you won’t have much other reason to come back to it. You can select individual missions if you want, replaying the more memorable ones, which is good, since you may not want to play through the entire game again. All told, the single-player campaign will only last you a few hours, with some missions clocking in at five minutes or less.

The missions in Medal of Honor: Heroes are not very creative or unique from one another. A few will have you collect something, others will have you protect a certain area, but many of the levels are oddly enough capture-the-flag type missions. I’ve never played a single-player Medal of Honor that was quite like this. Some levels will have you going to five different parts of the map and all you are doing is capturing flags from the opposing Nazis. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it just feels like a multi-player mode in what is supposed to be an offline campaign.

Clearly Medal of Honor: Heroes was built with multi-player in mind. Not only is there Ad-Hoc local area multi-player, but EA is supporting the PSP’s Infrastructure as well. The most impressive part of this is not that it’s online, but that it supports up to 32 people in one game at any time. You might not have thought it to be possible, but the PSP can manage this with little lag to speak of, though the players do tend to move slow. Nonetheless, you will rarely find a situation where your reaction time is delayed by lag. However, the shotgun has ridiculous range and you may suffer from spawn kills.

All told, Medal of Honor: Heroes is a distinct and fun PSP shooter that owners of the system should look into. The single-player is short, yet challenging, but the real fun is to be had online with the up to 32 people that can play in a single game. At peak hours, there should be several hundred people to play against, so you shouldn’t have a problem finding a match. It’s been a pretty good fall for the PSP with shooters. Let’s just hope that Medal of Honor: Airborne turns out fine on the PS3.

Graphics: 8
Sound: 8.5
Gameplay: 8.5
Creativity: 6
Replay Value/Game Length: 8
Final: 8
Written by Kyle Review Guide

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