Medal of Honor: Airborne Revisited

Medal of Honor: Airborne was the 11th installment in the series that aimed to redefine the shooter franchise and the World War II shooter by doing something different with it. The game follows a paratrooper as they jump behind enemy lines in order to tackle objectives and each mission starts with a leap downward. The game wasn't ever particularly popular and I didn't find it to be anything special, but a number of folks I've talked to enjoy the game with the discussion often being more focused on the single player campaign. The multiplayer aspect is rather funny since you need to stop to aim, this causes people to hop around randomly spraying or ducking wildly side to side.

Medal of Honor: Airborne released at almost random during late 2007 being available on Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC. I mention random because the release dates varied by a month or so. Other planned, but cancelled versions included Xbox, Playstation 2 and Wii. The game was also made available on Xbox One through Xbox Backwards Compatibility. It was developed by EA Los Angeles and published by EA, obviously.


I really wasn't too blown away by the game having played it back near launch and all these years later it still doesn’t really impress me. The campaign is alright and it's definitely a different sort of shooter. The narrative follows a paratrooper group during the European theater of World War II in Italy, northern France, the Netherlands and Germany. The concept for gameplay is quite neat as it removes the linear approach other shooters have. This is done by the parachute landing technique and this greatly switches up the approach for levels. On reflection this works mostly well, but I did notice some objectives pop in upon approach and that some awkward landings could happen.

The environments have actually aged fairly well due to the gritty look, but some of the bad parts do stick out a lot now. I also found the general controller scheme to be strange and that most of the shooting feels awkward. Multiplayer really mirrors this as direct combat looks silly as the gameplay requires almost an entirely stopped position to make shots. I did like how one team is on the ground and the other drops in, that's a different way to do things. I wasn't too impressed by Medal of Honor: Airborne, but it's aged decently and was something new at the time while also being a distinct gameplay we haven't really seen since.

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