Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (Mac)

The first thing I noticed about the game was how real it felt. You start out in the back of a german transport truck, you know the kind with the canvas cover, getting trucked into a German compound. The tension and anticipation is amazing!! Your first job, with your squad, is to rescue an SAS agent being held hostage there. I'll just say you encounter resistance. When one of the truck drivers papers don't check out, the mayhem begins.

Other campaigns involve capturing and then driving tanks, stealthing through winter forests at night to take out antiaircraft guns, sneaking into bases to gather intel, demolition missions, rescuing pow's, infiltrating and planting charges inside a german UBoat, and the most insane - storming Omaha beach to commence operation Overlord, infiltrating their defenses, and taking out the gun towers - totally harrowing!! Sometimes you're alone, sometimes with others - Rangers, SAS, etc. The missions are believable, sensible, and seem necessary to the allied effort.

While the game is basically a 1st person shooter, there is always a mission to guide you. It always takes a little thinking to get the job done. On your compass there is a general guide as to what direction your mission should take you, as well as a general distance guide, but it's not that easy. Let's just say the shortest distance between two points isn't always a straight line, and getting there is no stroll down 5th Avenue.

I think the AI is great. Very few stupid guards and enemies. A little advice: Stealth works. Staying out of searchlights, and walking rather than running are quite effective. Sometimes not killing enemies is preferable to machine gunning everything. Often, if you're too loud the germans will sound the alarm, which brings others quickly. And it's damn tough finding your way out of town after destroying their radio communications, when you have twenty to thirty highly trained nazis with machine guns looking for you.

The weapons are appropriate to the period - which I like. This helps the learning curve. The range on the pistol is very different from the machine gun, from the sniper rifle. Reload time is a factor! At the beginning, I would run out of a clip at just the wrong time. Pay attention. This is especially true of the sniper rifle. I like that different weapons are useful in different situations - it's not just a "machine gun always" kind of game.

My favorite part is that skill works. Thinking works. If you walk in the middle of a road, you'll likely get taken out by a sniper - in one shot! Sometimes you have to impersonate German soldiers and officers. Know how? Neither did I. You have to learn. Hint: don't run.

Good games always feel a little short, and this is no exception. There are twenty levels, and they're all fun! The finale (which isn't Omaha beach) is so damn exciting and difficult, that you'll really feel like you've accomplished something!

Graphics and sound: Outstanding!

A couple rants: 1) Sometimes you can be firing a rifle or machine gun, say to take out a guy in a tower, yet 50 yards away, others don't hear it - good for us, but not too realistic; 2) No knife to use when you sneak up on folks; 3) You should have to drag dead folks out of the way - into closets or behind walls to maintain your secrecy; 3) When you're fully loaded up, you can carry two machine guns, a sniper rifle w/ scope, a silenced pistol, ten grenades, approx 1000 rounds of ammo, and sometimes a bazooka. Can you say 75 lbs? Hardly inconspicuous. Sometimes, you might start with just a sniper rifle, or a pistol, but you can load up pretty quick, with no adverse effects; 4) On a couple missions you end up killing like two hundred folks - by yourself. Hmmm . . . . These are small points - I just get excited about the realism and envision the next level.

I haven't enjoyed a game this much in a long time. Can't wait for the sequel.

Pluses: (1) Great levels and visuals. Lots of detail, weather effects, etc. Imagine going through a ruined German village during a rainstorm, looking for German squads and snipers. Intense. (2) Enemy AI - very smart (for the most part). They'll take cover, group up, throw handgrenades, spray around corners with a machine gun, etc. This area impressed me. (3) Did I mention handgrenades? This is the first FPS game I played where the enemy used handgrenades to good effect.

Minuses: (1) Sometimes you're with a squad of your own soldiers, and sometimes they're not too bright. On the other hand, they can sometimes show you where the enemy snipers are just by the direction they're firing in. Not a big deal, except for the level where you're supposed to keep them alive... (2) Snipers are tough to kill, sometimes _very_ tough. And one level is almost all snipers - kind of a sniper alley - and very, very difficult. I finally had to resort to a walk-through to find out at least the general area where the snipers were.

All in all, a very good game. Multiplayer is fun too.

That said, there are some problems that I'd like to discuss in this review. For starters, there's game performance. I own a PowerMac G4 867DP (MDD) with a GeForce MX440 32MB card and 1GB RAM. This was a heavy-duty machine when MOH came out. And I get frame rate drops all the time, even with resolution at medium, detail at medium, and resolution at only 1024x768 (sub 30fps numbers). This is compared with >45 fps with RTCW on max settings at 1024x768 res (Both are based on the Quake3 engine BTW). The game almost drops to 1fps briefly when you hit a checkpoint. I have upgraded to the latest version which is supposed to include routines that allow for both of my processors to be utilized, but this hasn't made much impact on the gameplay.

Second off, the graphics at the resolution I've had to play (as mentioned above) aren't as impressive as the box art, and the colors are not as deep. The texture mapping is poor, and granted this is an effect of both the lower memory of my Apple GeForce card and my settings, it is kind of disappointing.

Third, and final, the game can be astonishingly hard (I had to replay the Normandy Beach mission 8-9 times before I got past the beachhead into the bunker) even on the easy setting. It is no walk in the park like RTCW.

Getting back to some pros and leaving the cons aside, the missions are engrossing. The mission where you sabotage a U-boat by infiltrating the base as a Nazi officer and then getting discovered when you plant the first explosive is great -- and I had almost sadistic fun intentionally blowing my cover and anhillating the whole base with an MP40. The sniper alley mission in Normandy is impressively difficult but very satisfying to beat (hint: you don't have to kill EVERY Nazi but it is fun to do so!).

The sound effects are excellent too. The "ping!" of an M1 clip running out, the "rat-tat-tat" of the Thompson, and the "crack!" of a KAR-98 sniper rifle are more realistic than the sounds from RTCW.

The weapons selections are a history buff's fantasy. You get to use the following:
US Army: M1911A1 .45 cal pistol, M1 Garand rifle, Browning Automatic Rifle, Springfield Sniper rifle, Winchester Pump 12 Ga. shotgun, Thompson .45 cal SMG, US "Bazooka" antitank rocket, and Browning .50 cal machine gun.
Axis: Luger 9mm pistol, MP40 SMG, KAR98 sniper rifle, Panzerfaust antitank rocket, STG44 "Sturmgewehr" automatic rifle (the first modern assault rifle), MG44 machine gun
You also get to fool with explosives of every sort.

The detail to the levels is amazing, and realistic as well. '88' antiaircraft guns can block your path and require an airstrike you can call in. Grenades bounce like the real thing (and do require some serious practice to get the hang of). P-51 Mustangs fly overhead in the Normandy missions. German soldiers speak German (not accented English). There are no "secret labs."

This is a very satisfying game with serious attention paid to realism and detail which immerse you in the environment, but it is very demanding on even the upper echelon of G4 processors.