The Wii control system used by Medal of Honor is badly conceived, and badly implemented to boot. Just in case the sarcasm in the above paragraph isn't quite apparent enough, the answer is "no". It's a Wii game, right? So even if the levels are badly designed, the encounters are dull, and the objectives are exactly the same as 20 other games, surely the addition of Wiimote controls is an automatic injection of pure fun, distilled directly from the DNA of Shigeru Miyamoto himself? That's the magic of the Wii, isn't it? It's a shame it happens all of about, oh, twice. That, in fact, is the high point of the game. The sole point of interest is the fact that you parachute in to the various encounters - which is quite cool, allowing you to control the 'chute by moving the Wiimote and nunchuck like the ropes of a real parachute. The environments are dull, linear and uninteresting. The AI of enemy soldiers is painfully, utterly, desperately stupid (and the AI of your colleagues is little better). STUCK IN INCREDIBLY GENERIC WW2 SHOOTER ENVIRONMENT STOP SEND HELP STOPĪs for those of us who have mown down the entire population of Germany at least seven times over in recent years, suffice it to say that not only does Vanguard offer nothing you haven't done five times before, it also doesn't do it remotely as well as other titles have. If you've somehow missed out on the proliferation of Call of Medals For Brothers Honorably doing their Duty in Arms titles in the last decade, this may actually seem fresh and interesting - but you'll probably be far too busy marvelling at how blue the sky is now that you've moved that giant rock to care about Wii games very much. Just like you have in countless games over the last ten years. You'll find yourself hauling your way through a bombed out French village, clambering through trenches surrounded by snipers to clear a path for your unit, attaching charges to artillery guns, being handed a rocket launcher just in time to take down a couple of tanks, capturing a field command bunker and then defending it against an assault. This, sadly, is basically an excuse to shuttle you around between the various generic encounters you'll remember from every WW2 game you've ever played.
The idea behind Vanguard (aside from "quick, get a game out for the Wii! It's what all the cool kids are buying!") is that you are one of the grunts of the 82nd Airborne Division, who parachute in to soften up an area before the main assault.
Medal of honor game controls series#
And reduced to the role of camp follower for Activision's CoD series (despite being the daddy of the WW2 FPS genre), here comes Medal of Honor Vanguard - cresting the hill, and bringing with it perhaps the most generic collection of World War 2 videogame cliches we've ever seen in a single game. It's the painfully average Call of Duty 3 - now with murkier textures and nonsensical control scheme! It's the utterly awful Far Cry Vengeance. See how you're not aiming anywhere near the enemy? Yeah, that'll happen a lot.
Medal of honor game controls license#
Unfortunately, like fat people shovelling pomegranate seeds into their mouths because some scientists somewhere said they might be quite good for you under certain circumstances, publishers have leapt on this cautious endorsement of the Wiimote for first-person blasting as a license to launch every FPS franchise in the arsenal on the console. So we think that FPS games might be pretty good on Wii, with a bit of tweaking to the mechanics of the hoary old genre. The upcoming Metroid Prime 3 has worked extremely well on its various demo outings. The otherwise utterly execrable Far Cry: Vengeance had a surprisingly well balanced control mechanism, let down somewhat by the fact that there was nothing interesting to see or shoot at.
There's a theory, as yet unproven, that the Wii will be a great console for FPS games, and occasionally we see a glimmer of that promise shining through. Got a couple more minutes on your hands? Allow us to explain. So for the benefit of those popping in to see if we've reviewed MOH on the Wii before heading down to their local game emporium, here's the executive summary:
We know, we understand it's been a bit barren for the last couple of months, after all. It's Friday, you've just been paid and you want a new game for your Wii.