Medal of Honor: Generic Warfighter

So, after my last blog post about games, I feel like I’m obliged to admit that I’ve recently acquired Medal of Honor: Warfighter and Bioshock: Infinite, which I pretty much bought from the credit I received for handing in ‘a couple’ of old games I’m never playing anymore.

Two games :3

Yep, I pretty much only included the receipt there to show how long it was, because that’s twelve games I handed in, mostly because I’m never going to play them anymore and have zip emotional investment in them. I kept games like the Army of Two games, mostly because of the fun I had with my little brother playing them and the fact that at least the first one had great humour, even if it was a bit lacking in the story department.
The same goes up for the Gears of War games, of which I beat the first two in co-op with my bro as well, and I still need to see if I can bait him into playing the third one together. Probably won’t happen, though.
What I’m in doubt about, is keeping both HAWX and HAWX2, because I greatly enjoyed HAWX, but the story and missions of HAWX2 were really starting to get on my nerves real quick. I’m a bit of a military plane fan, but the arcade style of the first game was a lot better than the style of the second one, where things were a lot more unclear and there were quite a few points of unfair difficulty (instant-death space lasers, anyone?) that really threw the reality out of the window with about as much force as it could possibly manage. I know, Tom Clancy games tend to do this (anybody who played Endwar knows what I’m talking about, and HAWX2 appears to play at least around the same time period…), but the first HAWX didn’t do that and remained feasible at least. Kind of. If you disregarded the military strength a corporation managed to muster, anyway (spoilers). I liked that one better.

Anyway, on to the point I was trying to go and make. I played Warfighter and beat it in a day or two. It was way shorter than what I was expecting it to be, though I think it equalled a Call of Duty game in length. It was a disappointment.
Why, you may ask. I knew what I was going in to, what with spectacle-based Modern Warfare shooters being the short campaign beasts they are. However, when I opened the case, I saw two discs. Two. So I put the first one in, booted up the game, ran the patch (because there’s always a patch) and allowed the game to boot properly. After the obligatory ‘press start’ screen, I was confronted with the question of whether I wanted to ‘install the HD pack for the full game experience’, which was partnered with the message that this would require 1.7 gigabytes of hardware space.

1.7 gigabytes.

I hate to be honest, but I didn’t exactly splurge when I bought my XBOX and went for the one with the smaller hard drive (40 gigs, if I remember correctly), which has started to fill up over time. I don’t have the space to manage what would essentially be a 1.7 gigabyte texture pack, so I decided that no, fuck you, I don’t want your ‘HD pack’, hit ‘no’ and went on.
After I pushed that aside and entered the start screen, I wanted to start the campaign (I’m a single player guy), only to be prompted to ‘insert the single player disc’. So, the game didn’t actually run the amazing graphics that were promised, it had also taken the trouble of dividing the multiplayer (which I have no intention of even trying, if there’s even a multiplayer base left) and the single player content over different discs. Considering the size of the HD dvd’s of the XBOX, that means there’s quite some room left to make an AMAZING single player experience, right?
WRONG.
It was generic, at best. Having played the previous modern Medal of Honor game, I recall an amazing chopper level, where you actually controlled the gunner of an attack helicopter. Though it wasn’t an actual shooter mechanic and it could be made out to be ‘gimmicky’, I enjoyed that part immensely (see the part about HAWX, above). There was nothing like that, though there were two incredible clusterfucks they called driving levels, where all you did was drive a car through busy streets at high speeds. Though exhilarating during play, I frequently found myself being frustrated by them (one mistake and you were as good as done for, with very little recovery possible if you, say, hit a wall and came to a full stop) and realized, afterwards, that I didn’t even enjoy them.

Another point was the gunplay. So far, I haven’t found a way to see what gun you’re holding, except for the ones you pick up from the enemy. However, there is no reason to pick up a gun from the enemy, because you’re never without an ally and your allies are walking ammo containers that give out ammo like candy on request and don’t appear to run out of ammunition or grenades… ever. So you never really ditch your starting weapons, which means you’ll never find out what guns you’re using (because of the aforementioned point).
One of the strong points of Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 was the weapon customisation option during the campaign, which basically gave you the chance to choose which weapons and attachments your character was going to carry at the start of the mission. Sure, there were a couple of suggested options, which meant that you would be ‘optimised’ for the tasks at hand, but nothing was forcing you to follow those suggestions.
This system allowed you to get familiar with the different weapons and find preferences. I know I never ran without an LMG as soon as I saw the destruction one could create with those beasts, something that I couldn’t possibly do with Warfighter. I never knew what kind of weapons I was using, never had the option to choose a different loadout, and even if I managed to find what kind of weapon I was using, all the enemies were using different weapons (there’s even an achievement for getting 50 kills with ‘enemy weapons’ that’s called ‘Tier 1 imports’, or, basically, weapons that are too shitty for the main character to use), so there was absolutely no way for me to acquire my preferred gun. As such, all guns felt the same (mostly. Some, like shotguns, still had a clearly different feel, but there were awfully few differences with the ‘Assault Rifle’ category), and led to an ‘eh’ feel with each and every one of them. A real shame, because I play the modern shooters because of the guns. Sure, I’ll beat the story a couple more times for the achievements (I fancy myself a bit of an achievement hunter), but after that, it’s going straight back for store credit…

Anyway, I’m going to try and be done with it, soon. If I manage to find some regular play time (and I won’t), it’ll be done in about a week or two, so we’ll see…