Medal of Honor: Airborne - multiplayer hands-on

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Get ready to watch the skies - or drop out of them - in fast, intimately chaotic team skirmishes

If you've ever played a World War II-themed shooter in your life, then you already have a basic idea of what to expect from the multiplayer action in Medal of Honor: Airborne. Playing as either an Allied or Axis soldier, you'll skulk through war-torn cities and villages, battling the other team through streets and the ruins of shelled houses for kills and/or control points.

It looks awesome and plays great, but there's not a lot here you haven't seen already - just keep your head down, shoot to kill, marvel at the shattered European scenery and hope to God you aren't awarded Most Useless at the end of the match.

Then again, all the Allied guys silently drop into the action in parachutes, instead of just randomly spawning somewhere on the ground. That's new. Much like in the single-player campaign, Allied players begin each match in a plane circling the battlefield, and - once they've jumped out and deployed their chutes - they can land anywhere they want on the map, whether it's on the street, on a rooftop or right outside the Axis spawn point. Dropping in like this is fun - you can flare your chute if you want to try and drift somewhere far away, and although the single-player game penalizes you if you hit the ground at a bad angle, it doesn't matter here.

Mikel Reparaz
Mikel Reparaz
After graduating from college in 2000 with a BA in journalism, I worked for five years as a copy editor, page designer and videogame-review columnist at a couple of mid-sized newspapers you've never heard of. My column eventually got me a freelancing gig with GMR magazine, which folded a few months later. I was hired on full-time by GamesRadar in late 2005, and have since been paid actual money to write silly articles about lovable blobs.