Medal Of Honor

Believe it or not – and you may want to sit down for this revelation – real life isn't like mobile games. Skyscraper construction is slightly more complicated than dropping one block on top of another like in Tower Bloxx. Monkeys don't roll around in balls, camels don't bounce on clowns, and worms aren't handy with high-powered explosives.

Sorry if this comes as a shock.

Then there's military matters. In the real world, soldiers don't have flashing health bars indicating how wounded they are, and there aren't actually any randomly-scattered first-aid packs lying about in Iraq or Afghanistan to patch them up. In the real world, one mistake – and a single bullet – can be all it takes to kill a man. And, of course, there's no Continue mode.

In that sense, Medal Of Honor is a break from the mobile norm, seeing as one bullet IS enough to kill your character. Admittedly, he respawns straight away at the last Save point, and there were none of those in Baghdad last time we looked. But if you like your games doused in cold, steely realism, Medal Of Honor's tough policy will appeal.

Then again, it does use the traditional 'one man takes on an entire army' plotline so beloved in the gaming and movie industries. And Medal Of Honor ultimately feels a little over-familiar in other ways, too.

You play a solitary Allied soldier tasked with infiltrating the German Peenemunde rocket base and associated warehouses, aiming to sabotage the next V2 rocket launch, destroy other rockets, and then blow up the main factory to prevent mass deployment of the V2s.

Easy, right? And all while whistling a patriotic tune and primping your moustache.

On console and PSP, Medal Of Honor is a first-person-shooter, with a squad of infantry backing you up. On mobile, that could've easily translated into a top-down squad'em'up along the lines of Call Of Duty 3 or Company Of Heroes. Instead, EA has ditched the rest of the team, and pitched you into a platform action / adventure that is more along the lines of Splinter Cell Double Agent.

So, levels involve creeping about jumping over boxes, hitching rides in lifts, and shinning up and down ladders. The fact that one bullet kills you means you have to be extra stealthy: hence the ability to hide by crawling along the ground or leaping into a bin, as well as pressing the 'hash' key to whip out a pair of binoculars and see what lies ahead.

The game takes place in the Peenemunde base, the V2 warehouse, and finally in the rocket factory. Not that there's a big difference between these locations visually: they all use pretty much the same colour palette and feel similar. The graphics are sharp and detailed though, with characters small enough to ensure you get a good amount of level on-screen at once.

Naturally, each level is crawling with German guards, and you have three ways to kill them.

First, you can shoot them, which is quickest, but uses up bullets. You have a fairly limited supply in Medal Of Honor, although there are occasionally some to pick up off the floor. But you can't just yomp around firing wildly – it really is a case of picking your shots.

Hence the alternatives of pushing boxes off heights to squash guards or sneaking up behind them with a knife soon come in handy. Tension is added by the fact that if guards spot you, a little 'WAIT' speech bubble appears above their heads, indicating that you should a) shoot or b) hide. Sharpish.

This is certainly not your average brainless action game. Medal Of Honor is well put together, and looks good. The problem is that firstly it's too unforgiving: making a single mistake can kill you. The respawn points are positioned often enough to ensure you don't lose too much ground when you die, but dying 27 times before finishing a level is frustrating, certainly compared to similar games.

More importantly, there's no real feeling of discovery as you progress through the game. The levels don't feel vastly different, and there's not many different weapons to pick up. Even a few grenades would've spiced the game up a bit.

The presentation is pretty basic too – there's none of the set-piece scenes that made Splinter Cell Double Agent such a rivetting experience.

Medal Of Honor is a pretty good game, and doesn't disgrace its console parent. But it often feels uninspired, while the constant threat of instant death adds tension in entirely the wrong way.