Medal of Honor: Airborne

The true heroes among us - the brave, the reckless and those who are aware that this is a game, and you don’t actually die in real life - will want to drop into the thick of the action. Your options are only limited by the landing range of your parachute, and your ability to land well - if you aim for the town hall roof and botch the landing, you’ll be shot down before you even get your gun out.

If you’ve got the Springfield sniper rifle, of course, you might like to land on a rooftop and pick off a few of the fascists before you work out how to get down and pistol-whip the rest. Alternatively, you might like to sail through a window, just to see who’s in there and if they’re surprised to see you. Or you could go for completion and seek out the five difficult skill drops dotted around each operation.

The six campaigns take you through a decent variety of locations, each with a different feel. Operation Avalanche takes you to some ruins, and what feels like an excavation site. The third operation is spread across some farmland, trenches and coastal pill-boxes more evocative of other WWII games. In Operation Market Garden you’ll be running from one broken house to another, in a ring of pretty demolition.

The openness of your options and the freedom of the AI to retaliate as it sees fit both work well, but if you’re thinking that every game you play will be miraculously different from start to finish, you’ll be disappointed. Cover points and machine gun encampments are obvious, and the AI will take advantage of them in predictable ways. For example, once you learn that the AI really likes manning those MG outposts, you can sit and snipe his head out, knowing that another one will be there to take his place soon enough. It’s a case of making the game boring for yourself on purpose, and you kinda wish that “large pile of your friends” corpses’ would act as a more powerfully negative affordance for your Nazi foes.