Video Game Vintage Title: Medal Of Honor: Airborne

Medal Of Honor: Airborne

Medal of Honor: Airborne is a World War II first-person shooter video game and the 11th installment of the Medal of Honor series. It was developed by EA LA and was released worldwide on Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360 in September 2007. Versions for the PlayStation 2 and Wii were planned but they were cancelled in 2007. Instead, Medal of Honor: Vanguard was released exclusively for those consoles. A PlayStation 3 version was released November 2007. The game takes place in the European theater of World War II, and is the first in the series to focus only on paratrooper activities.

In the single-player mode, the player takes on the role of PFC/CPL Boyd Travers, a fictional paratrooper in the US 82nd Airborne Division. Missions include various insertions into Italy, northern France, the Netherlands and Germany, each one beginning with a jump behind enemy lines. Airborne also features a multiplayer mode available for online play, where users have the choice of fighting for the Allies and parachuting down to the battlefield, or fighting for the Axis and starting on the ground, defending the position from enemy paratroopers.

The game uses a massively improved version of Unreal Engine 3. Airborne employs a nonlinear gameplay style whereby the player can start the game anywhere in the map by directing where they land, as opposed to previous linear FPS games where the start point and direction is already laid out, such as Allied Assault.

Medal Of Honor: Airborne Plot

The story begins with a brief training level, set in North Africa, but then takes the player to the first mission: Operation Husky, set in the Italian village of Adanti. Objectives include killing three German officers and assaulting a machine gun nest in the fortified Town Hall.

The next mission is Operation Avalanche, set in an abandoned archaeological dig near Rome. Objectives here include destroying radio equipment, fuel tanks, and an ammunition dump.

The third is Operation Neptune, set on Utah Beach, with the player inserting behind German lines to take out key objectives to prevent them being used against the Operation Overlord invasion force.

The fourth is Operation Market Garden, in which the player inserts into Nijmegen and must battle his way through the destroyed town, to ultimately confront a Tiger tank at Nijmegen Bridge.

The fifth is Operation Varsity, which has the player sent to a Nazi weapon factory in Essen, Germany, to destroy various targets, including tanks, a railway gun, and an armored train.

The final mission, Der Flakturm, has the player landing atop a partially destroyed flak tower (flakturm). He and his men must battle their way down, encountering heavy resistance, to place demolition charges and destroy it. The name of the specific flak tower is not mentioned in the game.

Medal Of Honor: Airborne Gameplay

Each mission is introduced by a briefing cutscene at the beginning, and another cutscene takes place inside the aircraft, preparing to jump. Notable also is that each weapon in the game (including grenades) can be upgraded by killing enemies. More points are awarded for headshots and melee kills.

And finally, instead of facing standard enemies with randomized appearances and weapons, the player faces predetermined enemy types, ranging from the Italian Blackshirt to the SS Storm Elite. Harder enemy types are encountered as the game progresses.

Reception
Medal of Honor: Airborne has received generally positive reviews from critics. Aggregating review websites GameRankings and Metacritic gave the PC version 77.53% and 78/100, the PlayStation 3 version 76.00% and 75/100 and the Xbox 360 version 74.22% and 73/100.

GameSpot awarded the game 7.0/10, saying "the single-player campaign doesn't get cooking until the last two levels, but those two levels combined with solid multiplayer make it worth enlisting in Airborne." IGN awarded Airborne a rating of 7.9/10, saying that "Airborne, while not perfect, is definitely the best game in the franchise to come along in quite a while". Press Start Online stated that Airborne was "a Medal of Honor game that's not only good, it demonstrates a level of imagination and innovation that's becoming increasingly rare in the genre". Most reviewers praised the music from the games that Medal of Honor, with IGN stating in particular that the title music, which was said to bring back some classic memories from Allied Assault and the starting music for Operation Market Garden for Campaign.