Medal of Honor™: Pacific Assault

Basically, what it says in the title - it's a shooter on rails, can't be called otherwise, despite all the "vehicles" they have in there and the "mission". It's best to think of it as of a movie or a visual novel, interspersed with action sequences. Unfortunately, the action sequences are boring and repetitive, the AI of the enemies and your team leaves much to be desired, the difficulty is compensated by making the enemies spawn in infinite numbers. I didn't expect much of the game, so I wasn't disappointed, unlike some other reviewers, but I played the Battlefield series before, and I definitely prefer those. Bring the Battlefield series on GOG!

Ive no idea why this game is rated so low it is one of the best FPS games to cover combat in the first half of the Pacfic Theater of WWII. I think of it as a good companion campaign to Call of Duty's classic World at War which covered the fighting in the later half of the war against Japan. The graphics where great for the time the jungle fighting is hectic with pitched battles ambushes and banzai charges. Most notably the night banzi charge on the ridges of Guadacanal and the landing on Tarawa are well represented as well as the Battle of Pearl Harbor. I also really like the squad system. All in all its a great MOH game from a time when the series was putting more focus on the ground combat of WWII ala Call of Duty. It is probably one of my favorites in the series and if you like games like MOH Airborne, COD 2, 3, or COD Big Red One and enjoy WWII history give it a try. Well worth the asking price.

I got this along with MOH:AA Warchest and having been wowed by it's predecessor, this turn out to be a very disappointing experience. Off the bat, the game starts off with one of the worst "tutorial" in history. There are "blatant" in your face tutorials but at least there at quick to the point and end quickly. Pacific Assault thought it was being clever trying to dress it up as part of the intro ( via flashback ). But come on... it felt almost like a half a misson level by the time I completed the "tutorial" On the game itself, the tight game mechanics and shooting were nowhere to be found here. I felt I carry pea shooter with the weight of a MG42 no matter what weapon I was holding. After experiencing WWII Euro campaign, it was actually quite refreshing to see on set in the Pacific region. Although it wasn't as epic as the Normandy beachhead level but it got the job done. Missons levels were a mixed bag. A lot mid-level game loads and un-exciting objectives made for a forgettable game. Buy it only for the Pacific setting.

While its not as big, or content rich, as the Allied Assault War Chest, It's still a very good game. This time around, the developer went for a more cinematic approach, and introduced squad commands and for the first time in the series ADS. As the name suggests, this game takes place in the Pacific Theater of World War II, as opposed to Europe, making it one of the very few MoH games to do so. By the time this was made, Medal of Honor and Call of Duty were in an arms race of sorts. Each new game of their respective franchise trying to outdo the competition. Pacific Assault also shows of, what was for the time, an impressive new game engine, rather than the same modified Quake 3 engine that was seriously showing it's age by 2004. What's here is a really immersive game that positively whoops it's console counterpart "Medal of Honor: Rising Sun". If you can get it cheap, go for it.

Pacific Assault follows the theme of Allied Assault: A war epic reminiscent of the movie Saving Private Ryan and the mini series Band of Brothers, both directed by Steven Spielberg who also wrote the stories for the first three games in the series. Despite fighting with your squad, it's not of much help except for the corpsman which can heal you on a limited number of times - often 2x in my playthrough on difficulty 'Hard'. If you take cover behind a tree or rock and prone to the side to take care of attacking enemies, you cannot rely on your mates to cover the other side and will often get stabbed to death. The corridor - be it a valley, jungle path or trench - widens sometimes for enemy installations like control posts but you get under fire when you approach unless a sneaking approach has been scripted in. If there is thick foliage, the enemy will still shoot through it at you while you are not able to see them. There can be bugs like your squad members spawning outside of the playable area and you will have to finish the end of the previous mission to fix it. Aiming can get stuck and one has to switch to desktop and back to the game to fix. There is no in-game option to activate windowed mode, according to the forum it can be configured in a text file. The game might be best suited for players who enjoy a shooter which requires taking cover often, don't have too high demands on graphics and like to fight hordes of enemies from time to time. If you want a game which makes good use of the squad setting, look for a different game, e.g. Hidden & Dangerous where you can control every member and assign different weapons to them. For a less narrow corridor-y single player tactical shooter (in its exterior levels) released in the same year, check out Far Cry.