PSP Review: Medal of Honor Heroes

Arguably one of the most common complaints among PSP gamers has been that the system lacks a second analogue stick, handicapping it for games that work better using this control scheme. Perhaps the hardest hit genre so far has been First Person Shooter (FPS) games. Early attempts at mastering fluid 3d control on the single-stick PSP proved disasterous. Perhaps what hurt the most about games like Coded Arms and Ghost in the Shell is that they looked fantastic on the PSP — proving that the hardware was more than capable of tackling the genre, even if the controls left a bad taste in our collective mouths.

Two years into the PSP library, we have finally seen some successes. Third-person shooters like Socom, Metal Gear Solid, and Syphon Filter all demonstrated that military action games could be translated to the platform with minor gameplay adjustments, while still remaining fun and easy to control. The problem with all of these games is that they flirt with FPS gameplay conventions without actually capturing the essence of the elusive purebred FPS.

Medal of Honor Heroes was released with minimal hype last fall, and went largely unnoticed in the gaming press. Now that the holiday gaming rush has died down we finally managed to snag a copy and put it to the test. We can happily report that it does an admirable job of recreating the frenzy of FPS action on the PSP and almost lives up to the experience offered by its bigger console brothers.

The single player experience follows the exploits of three allied special-forces soldiers as they fight behind enemy lines in Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands. Missions are broken down into primary and secondary objectives, which appear as markers on a minimap in the lower right corner of the screen. Primary objectives range from blowing up key installations to stealing a Nazi enigma machine. Secondary objectives are usually more banal and involve simply running over to documents scattered around the battlefield and picking them up. Players are provided with a supply of expendable AI combat buddies to assist with mission objectives. They will usually simply follow you around and shoot at Nazi soldiers as they approach your squad. The AI is not especially intelligent, and will die fequently from enemy and friendly fire. Thankfully, they are not critical to mission success and will gradually respawn if you lose them all. An offline skirmish mode rounds out a relatively short but entertaining campaign that will take from 8-10 hours to complete.

Graphically, Medal of Honor is an impressive feat on the PSP. The dozen or so maps spread over Western Europe are highly detailed and contain enough debris and interiors to provide plenty of cover during firefights. Environment textures are rendered at low resolution, but they look fantastic on the small screen. The various weapons are modeled convincingly and grenades give off satisfying clouds of smoke when they explode. Seeing german bodies fly in all directions after a well-placed grenade is an incredible experience on the PSP and often had us shaking our heads in wonderment.

The developers had to cut some corners with this release, however the only place where it is really evident is in the character models. Up close enemy soldiers look natural, but from a distance they appear as bland 2d sprites and do a kind of moonwalk/hustle dance until they approach close enough to be rendered normally. This is a minor blemish and does not significantly hurt gameplay since soldiers can still be shot at a distance.

Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of Medal of Honor is that the developers managed to include a full featured online multiplayer mode for up to 32 players. Incredibly, entering and earning frags in online matches is simple and lag-free thanks to a highly polished lobby system. Players can join and leave matches already in progress, and follow their stats in an online leaderboard. The multiplayer modes on offer are pretty conventional fare, and they include deathmatch, team deathmach, capture the flag and domination. There have been some complaints about certain weapons being unbalanced, particularly the shotgun, however we found that the wide variety of objectives and terrain types meant that each weapon was useful in particular instances. Being fragged from behind by a shotgunner is still annoying, but watching them evaporate in a puff of grenade smoke is doubly satisfying.

Medal of Honor does not have the massive online following enjoyed by games like Socom and Syphon Filter, but there is a core community of dedicated gamers who continue to host and populate servers. And for good reason, because this is a complex and fully-featured game that should not be missed.

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Things we didn’t like:

Final Score: 9/10