Hands on with Medal of Honor Heroes 2 on PSP
If at first you don't succeed, try and try again
No matter how many times you try to tell a child not to put their hand on a hot stove, they never learn the lesson until they experience the searing pain of a burn.
The same could be said of making a first-person shooter for PSP. Every developer thinks they can make it work on the handheld – until they get burnt, that is.
Electronic Arts walked away with a minor heat rash following the release of Medal of Honor Heroes and as such is attempting to touch the white-hot genre on PSP once again in this sequel.
Medal of Honor Heroes 2 puts you in the boots of Lieutenant John Berg. As an agent in the OSS, you're charged with clandestine missions to disrupt occupying German forces in the north of France. The campaign – which consists of seven missions – has you join with the 5th Rangers as they infiltrate a small coastal town in the days following the naval invasion at Normandy. Lt Berg certainly aids his buddies in battle, but he's got his own orders and it's up to you to make sure they're followed through.
We took a run through the first mission, which involves a harrowing assault on a German-controlled sea wall. The opening scene shows Lt Berg joining a squad of other soldiers as they land on the war-torn beach. Immediately given control of the lieutenant, it was up to us to guide him across the sandy shore to the base of the wall.
Heavy machine gun fire succeeded in suppressing our movement; although, we quickly darted between pieces of cover whenever there was a gap in fire. Some of our buddies weren't as fortunate to make it across, however, shredded as they were before our eyes in a shower of bullets.
Once at the base of the sea wall, we were given a secondary objective to destroy an ammunition cache before scaling the heights. Chucking a grenade into the bunker housing the cache quickly cleared up that sub-mission and, conveniently, opened a path up the sea wall. The slow, steady hike was punctuated by shoot-outs against Nazi soldiers.
Opponents were keen on taking cover, but didn't last long when standing in our sights thanks to liberal hit detection ensuring our bullets pierced enemy flesh rather than scenery. While this will make combat a little easy, it's an understandable compromise as a means of addressing the rather limited controls on PSP when dealing with this genre.
But even without the generous hit detection, dispatching our foes wouldn't have been a problem. Enemies don't seem terribly intelligent, doing little to protect themselves from incoming fire beyond dipping behind cover. During a later mission we played set within the crumbling remains of a French town, we noticed several Nazi soldiers standing in the middle of the street, firing at us in clear view. Not only did this make it easy to pick them off, but it also let us know where we needed to go in what proved an extremely linear mission.
When you complete a level, you receive a medal based on your performance. Firing accuracy, damage taken, and secondary objectives completed factor into any such potential decoration. The more gold medals you earn across the seven campaign missions, the more bonuses you unlock.
What appears most promising about Medal of Honor Heroes 2 is an extension of the 32-player online multiplayer offered in the first game. Beyond technical improvements to increase the stability of online play, six new maps have been designed for use in three modes. Instead of offering a large slate of multiplayer options, focus is being placed on the most popular examples from the original game: deathmatch, team deathmatch, and infiltration ('capture the flag').
We didn't have the opportunity to try multiplayer out, but the game's November release means it isn't a long way before we can test it fully. Hopefully it'll offer more value than the single-player campaign, which looks to clock in at well-under five hours. Click 'Track It!' to stick with us come review time.
