Medal of Honor Heroes 2 review

The Medal of Honor series has now officially lasted longer than the actual World War 2 itself and while Call of Duty wanted to move forward by turning itself into Modern Warfare, the MOH series is permanently stuck in the past. The World War 2 genre became boring about five years ago, so yet another game where you control Americans pretending that they actually did something during the war doesn’t exactly fill us with excitement, especially when it’s an FPS on the PSP.

Words by Adam Gulliver , playing on a Sony PSP.

First lets get the controls out of the way. The default control option is using the analogue nub to move and the four face button to look up, down, left and right. This is where the problems first arise. Using the face button to look around is far too sluggish to actually be of any use. Even on the easiest difficulty its made infuriating by the inability for your character to actually look where you want him to. The other main problem with the controls is the sprint. To do this you need to push the nub up twice in quick succession, but it rarely ever works. Often it doesnt recognise it at all and youre left walking at a snails pace. Annoying when you have to run from an exploding bomb while fighting off a horde of Nazis.What does help you during these moments where youre fighting with the controls is the Nazi AI, or lack thereof. Its common for them to just run at you like a band of suicide bombers, failing that, they crouch behind a box with half their body exposed. A lot of the time the difficulty comes from when youre up against an army of them. Some take cover in front, others will take shots at you from platforms dotted around. Its amazing that the AI may be rubbish but theyre able to shoot you perfectly from fifty miles away while youre too busy fighting the controls.What remaining fans of the series wont be happy with, but left us quite pleased is the shortness of the main campaign. At only around three hours you cant justify paying full price (or any price in fact) for this incredibly bland shooter. Medal of Honor Heroes 2 also has a tendency to repeat itself. Not within the game itself, but rather the whole series. Having played various other incarnations its starting to get boring completing the same objectives over and over again. Seriously, how many more times are they going to make us take out some anti-aircraft guns? To extend the lifespan there is a 32 person online mode which does work, though there have been numerous reports of people actually hacking the game in order to get the advantage. This amused us greatly. If youre going to hack a game at least hack something worthwhile folks.Its not all bad and reading back over this we may have been overly mean. Visually its quite beautiful and the mission narrator is suitably voice acted, it is certainly a technical achievement for the PSP. We suppose if youre really into your WW2 shooters and unlike everyone else in the world has yet to tire of the setting then its possible that youll get some joy out of it. Everyone else need not apply.