Activision has Call of Duty. Ubisoft has Tom Clancy. Sony has Killzone. Microsoft has Halo. Nintendo has Metroid. All great fran­chises that have gone on to sell mil­lions of cop­ies. Like the other big names EA too has cre­ated a world­wide phe­nomenon; Medal of Honor.

The series star­ted on the PlayStation and has cre­ated sev­eral hits that cemen­ted the Shooter genre in the gam­ing industry. However it was always about World War II and after spend­ing 15 years worth of games, the set­ting has grown pretty stale. After Medal of Honor: Airborne’s dis­ap­point­ing sales and crit­ical response the series has gone into hiberna­tion, until now. With EA Los Angeles cre­at­ing the single-player por­tion and DICE (Battlefield Series) cre­at­ing the Multi-Player por­tion Medal of Honor already sounds like a guar­an­teed suc­cess; or is it?

At E3 2010 EA finally took the lid of the Medal of Honor reboot and gave us the first game­play foot­age of the game ever. Set in mod­ern Afghanistan, the player becomes a Tier One oper­ator who is charged with some of the most dan­ger­ous and cov­ert oper­a­tions within the war. While the cam­paign and mis­sions are com­pletely fic­tional, the set­tings aren’t. Every map, every piece of ter­rain you step on is modeled after the real place. The map Kabul Ruins is pretty much an exact rep­lica of the city Kabul.

The beta has 2 maps with only one map per gam­e­type. Team Assault and Team Mission are the name of the game and each offers a dif­fer­ent yet very famil­iar way to play. When play­ing Medal of Honor you can’t help but feel that it is a hybrid of the Call of Duty and Battlefield fran­chises. Button lay­out is a mix­ture of both games with each lend­ing some­thing to the lay­out. Unlike both how­ever, the game has a slower pace to it. The char­ac­ters move much slower then both series mak­ing the game feel a little less like an arcade shooter. Like the other games though it is extremely easy to get killed. Standing out in the open is just not a good idea, although the Kabul City Ruins map offers a lot of CQC rather then open areas. The death prob­lem isn’t as heavy as games like MW2 though as unlike in those games you do not have super-vision in Medal of Honor. Here it is extremely hard to see far ahead of you even with sights on the guns. This makes aim­ing at people in a dis­tance tre­mend­ously dif­fi­cult, but it can also make it easier to escape a quick burst of gun­fire determ­ined to hit your skull.

There are 3 classes within the game with some cus­tom­iz­a­tion. Rifleman, Spec Ops, and Sniper classes. Rifleman gets Assault rifles, Light Machine Guns, and gren­ade launch­ers for his assault rifles. Spec Ops get Semi-Automatic rifles, shot­guns, and rocket launch­ers. Snipers get sniper rifles. All classes come with a stand­ard pis­tol and a gren­ade and can be tricked out with scopes, sup­press­ors, and all other gear that has been seen in lots of other shoot­ers. What makes Medal of Honor unique is just how much more in-depth the cus­tom­iz­a­tion goes. Ammo can now be tricked out with dif­fer­ent types offer­ing more power at the cost of range or vice-versa. The game also focuses squarely on upgrad­ing what you do have. In the beta, it seemed very clear that the main weapon and the even­tual second weapons received after lev­el­ing up are the only guns unlocked in the game. For example the American Rifleman starts with an M16 and upgrades are made for it in later levels, how­ever aside from the M249 SAW, he can­not get any more weapons. This how­ever is still a beta and more weapons could become avail­able in the full retail ver­sion.

Into the game we find Team Assault and Team Mission. Team Assault is Team Deathmatch. Kabul City Ruins offers up a pretty good entry point for the game. It’s a map that requires care­ful plan­ning due to tight corners. There are many choke points enemies and allies can use. DICE wanted to cre­ate a more real­istic scen­ario in the shooter and they have defi­antly suc­ceeded. The matches are always pretty equal because the bal­ance of power is still always shift­ing because who­ever holds cer­tain points of the map con­trols it. Even without there being loc­a­tions to cap­ture, Team Assault still man­ages to cap­ture that frantic feel­ing Battlefields Conquest mode always had.

The next game mode is Team Mission. In order to think of Team Mission cor­rectly ima­gine Rush Mode in Bad Company 2. One team (Americans) tries to cap­ture spe­cific points while the defend­ers (Taliban) attempt to knock off all of the enemy’s life tick­ets. The Americans are always the attack­ers while the Taliban always defend. The map is called Helmand Valley which is a huge map filled with trees, sand, and moun­tains pop­u­lat­ing the back­ground. Battles in this map can be hec­tic as vehicles are added to the map. Vehicles how­ever are not the power­houses they are in the Battlefield series, in fact they really only aid. They can clear paths and do dam­age, but they also can’t take much from Rocket launch­ers. Team Mission is sat­is­fy­ing, but it isn’t as pop­u­lar as Team Assault lim­it­ing play­time. Things can be dis­or­i­ent­ing at first because there is little instruc­tion on how the match works but is easy to get the hang of after a while.

To ensure that battles remain hec­tic and never bor­ing, DICE has imple­men­ted some smart ideas. The first is that the maps are expertly designed to fit the 12vs12 ratio. It never feels like you’re search­ing for a while to find an enemy. The second is that res­pawn times are vir­tu­ally non-existent. Usually you just see an anim­a­tion of you dying, a pic­ture of the person’s loadout, and then back to the class screen. It’s extremely easy and takes the frus­tra­tion out of dying and then wait­ing to rejoin the frag-fest.

Visually Medal of Honor doesn’t look bad, but its noth­ing spec­tac­u­lar either. Some tex­tures can look a little muddy and the tex­tures on both sides blend into scenery a little too much. There are also a lot of repeat­ing tex­tures at the moment for both side’s mod­els. This also leads into the anim­a­tion prob­lems. Animations in the game are extremely stiff to the point that it’s a bit uncom­fort­able to watch them. Death anim­a­tions are extremely pain­ful and highly unreal­istic with the model actu­ally hold­ing his hands up with his head arched up. Pretty weird. There is time to fix all of this how­ever as EA and DICE still have some pretty good time.

Killstreaks make an appear­ance in the form of Scorechains. In the beta, all that is avail­able is the abil­ity to activ­ate radar or the abil­ity to select a spot to rain mor­tar fire upon. Medal of Honor does a lot of things that other shoot­ers have been doing for a while, but it makes its own mark upon the genre in some pos­it­ive ways. Hopefully EA and DICE can go in and fix all the quirks and I’m sure we can have a fant­astic game on our hands. Medal of Honor is due out on the PS3, 360, and PC on October 12^th.