Medal of Honor: Vanguard review (PlayStation 2)

According to EA ‘You don’t play, you volunteer’. As far as PR statements on back of game boxes go, that’s as true a statement as you’re ever going to get. After all, I only persevered with MOH: Vanguard because I’d volunteered to do the review, not because I actually wanted to play it.

It might seem strange to break the age-old reviewing rule by voicing my opinion of a game before I’ve even told you anything in depth about it, but after wasting nearly six hours of my precious life playing this turgid, unoriginal, lacklustre tripe of a game, I had to get it off my chest.

Size does matter

Six hours! Was the game that bad that I didn’t even finish it before I succumbed and wrote the review? No (although if I’m honest it was incredibly tempting) but I am sorry to say that MOH: Vanguard weighs in with a paltry ten levels set across four campaigns which on the default medium difficulty level will last even the most ham-fisted of you six to seven hours at most, four hours on the first nine levels and about two to three hours on the final level.

Why the last level takes nearly as long as the rest of the game to complete is fairly simple; snipers and checkpoints. In order to progress you have to crawl through trenches and stick your head above ground level to get a look at the surroundings. Unfortunately as soon as you do you have a bullet rip into your head and you die. Quite how the sniper knew exactly where your head would pop up is beyond me, let alone how they’re able to line a shot up that quickly, but they do. You then repeat the process remembering where the flash of gunfire came from (if you were lucky enough to see it) and blast him away on the next go, only to repeat the same process for about 20 different sniper positions throughout the rest of the level. By the time you reach the tanks at the end of the level, your last checkpoint is about 20 minutes back, meaning that you have to repeat the arduous process all over again should you die (which inevitably you will).

The previous missions don’t even set you up for the challenge ahead. Parachuting into your first mission you can quickly annihilate all of the Nazis by finding cover and waiting for their heads to pop up. This tactic works throughout the first nine levels, with enemies quite happy to pop up like jack-in-the-boxes every few seconds.

Artificial Incompetence

That’s not to say you won’t die earlier on in the game because you will, very frequently in fact. But that’s mainly because your helpful squad members will quite regularly push you out from behind cover so that they can stand there or, even more helpfully, put their head in your line of sight, thus making you move from behind cover in order to get a shot in.

Another frequent cause of death is the hit detection. Many times throughout the game I was a few feet away from a Nazi filling him full of America’s finest lead, only for the bullets to seemingly pass straight through him and into the wall behind, thus giving him a clear shot.

But the brevity of the game and the frustrating last mission isn’t the main reason as to why MOH: Vanguard was such a chore to play. That accolade goes to the AI. If MOH is any indication of WWII itself, the Nazis were forced to defend their position until death by having their shoes glued to the floor. At no stage throughout the game did an enemy try to flank me. Even worse, on the very odd occasion that I managed to break from the invisible path and flank the enemy myself, they didn’t respond to me filling their backs full of lead and instead carried on quite happily firing into the distance at my inept squad members.

Your squad don’t fair any better in the AI stakes either. On numerous occasions they ran out into the open and confronted the enemy head on with no cover around, whereupon they spent the next few minutes firing at each other without actually hitting anything. On one occasion I hid round a wall and left them to it, to see how long this would go on for. A long time passed before one of the Nazis ran round the corner and suddenly panicked realising he must have left his shoes behind and started running around wildly, whilst my squad members flailed their arms around erratically trying to hit him with the butt of their gun. If the whole experience hadn’t been so painful it would have been funny.

Hilfe werde ich in dieser Wand gehaftet

Usually even if a game from EA doesn’t provide great gameplay you can at least spend a few sentences praising them on the presentation and the amazing visuals. Alas MOH: Vanguard doesn’t even have that to fall back on. Graphically it’s not really any prettier than Frontline (released five years ago) and suffers from frame-rate issues, especially when there are lots of explosions on screen. Your character doesn’t even have a crawling animation and the less said about the melodramatic animated death sequences of your enemies the better. There are also glitches that see people getting stuck in walls, guns floating in the air and I even fell through the ground after a parachute jump.

I can’t even pay much attention to the story as EA has put as little effort into it as possible (you’re Frank Keegan by the way, you fight in four different countries, no you won’t care one little bit about the rest of your squad and yes it does have lots of black and white footage).

The only thing of real note to say about the game is its sound. Even then it’s lacking the haunting orchestral scores of previous MOH games and others in this genre and some of the voice acting is more than a little hammy, but the sound effects do at least provide some tension and atmosphere to the proceedings.

There are four multiplayer options playable over split-screen with up to four players, Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Scavenger Hunt (exactly like Capture the Flag) and King of the Hill, but even these can’t lift MOH: Vanguard out of mediocrity. In fact Capture the Flag hasn’t even been play tested properly, as the few times we played it the flags re-spawned in the same position every single time.

It’s plainly obvious that the game didn’t receive the care and attention that fans of the series deserved. It feels rushed, it looks dated and it’s filled with annoying glitches that should have been ironed out during play testing. There are minor additions which might please some MOH fans, for instance you can now sprint which helps you get from cover to cover and you do parachute into some levels (although that sounds much better than it actually is) but when you consider that MOH: Frontline still provides a much more challenging and enjoyable experience even though it is five years old now, it’s hard to see who this game is actually going to appeal to.