Nov 21, 2007

When Medal of Honor first appeared, around the same time as Steven Spielberg’s gritty Saving Private Ryan, it was an eye-opener. War had never looked so realistic on big or small screen, and having seen the dirty gore of the movie, we could fill in the blanks left by the sanitised, bloodlessness of the game.

These days, WWII is just another videogame cliché, and Medal of Honor has long since slipped into self-parody. We don’t expect these things to be anything more than shooting galleries, with pre-scripted events triggering fresh waves of German soldiers to hide behind their designated crates. And that’s exactly what MoH Heroes 2 is. The solo mode is poorly designed, with limited restart points that chuck you back through huge chunks of the uninspired levels each time you die, but it definitely gets something very right indeed - and that’s the controls.

As far as handling goes, it’s everything we always hoped a Wii FPS would be. It’s so quick and responsive you’ll forget you’re holding a controller at all. The game seems hardwired into your hands, in fact. But to achieve this spontaneity, they’ve had to sacrifice an awful lot of visual detail. If it wasn’t for the fact that it never drops below 60fps, even in multiplayer, we might say it looks terrible - slain soldiers vanish before they’ve had time to crumple to the blurrily textured ground. As it is, the lightning speed provides a level of immersion that almost overrides the low-fi graphics.

The AI is equally basic, causing soldiers to face the wrong way while fighting and fail to shoot one another despite standing less than a meter apart. It’s possible to disconnect the nunchuk and play with just the remote, in which case the enemy stupidity isn’t so noticeable, but it isn’t a great experience.