Medal of Honor: Warfighter Preview

I think the most important factor to disclose before delving into the content, is the fact that Danger Close have developed the entirety of Medal of Honor: Warfighter, including both the single player campaign and the multiplayer. This may answer most people’s issues with last year’s title, which saw the single player campaign being developed by Danger Close and the multiplayer by DICE, creating essentially two completely separate games, with different feelings. This appears to have been remedied this year.

The major premise around the multiplayer gameplay, is that Danger Close have figured out a way to blend a two player cooperative experience, with a full 32-person multiplayer online match, and the results are fantastic.

The idea is for you to pair with a partner; think Battlefield squads, only half the size. Wherever your partner is on the map, you can see them, with a kind of inbuilt wall-hack. You have the option to spawn on your buddy, if they’re not in combat, otherwise you can spawn back at base. An interesting twist is the ‘avenge mechanic’, whereby if your partner avenges your death, by killing your killer, you will respawn immediately, without the usual spawn timer. This seems like a very nice addition. It’s certainly an original touch to the somewhat over-crowded first person shooter online multiplayer genre.

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The graphical fidelity is, of course, unquestionable, using the Frostbyte 2 engine means this game will certainly stand out among the crowd this autumn.

There are 72 Operators to unlock, throughout the game. All of which hold a primary and secondary weapon, a mixture of grenades and/or mines, and the all-important class specials. Of the 12 different Tier-1 units, covering 10 countries, the initial selections available in the E3 play session were: Grom (a grenadier of sorts, with air support as a special). SASR (your typical Assault class), JTF2 (more along the lines of Heavy Support, with a black hawk special),  OGA (Spec Ops class, with night vision and an A-16 special), SEAL (these are the Snipers, paired with a very useful UAV ability), SFOD-d (the newb-friendly class, featuring a Shotgun and grenade launcher).

The class specials are Medal of Honor’s answer to streak perks from Call of Duty, only, instead of having to gain killstreak bonuses to earn a range of powerful special abilities, in this game each class starts with different powerful abilities, and everyone must work together, utilising their own specialities for the benefit of the team.

Without wanting to use such a  blatant comparison, Medal of Honor: Warfighter has a touch of Modern Warfare feel to it, in a Battlefield world. As a fan of the last Medal of Honor game (controversial, I know) and a big COD/BF fan, I cannot wait for this title to hit the shelves this October.

Medal of Honor: Warfighter has much smaller maps than Battlefield 3, enabling a closer gun-on-gun experience, without all the running around looking for targets. The combat feels very realistic, and quite challenging, as with the last Medal of Honor, which leaned more toward war situational combat rather than the more arcade tendencies.

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After watching the E3 trailers, how excited are you for the latest title in the Medal of Honor re-boot franchise, and do you think it stands a chance against Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 and Halo 4? Voice your opinions below.

Medal of Honor: Warfighter is due for release on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii U, PlayStation Vita and Windows PC on 26th October, 2012 in the UK.