Medal of Honor™: Pacific Assault

WWII shooters are among my favorite games, I've played pretty much all of them. That being said, there are very few of them that deal with the Pacific Theatre of War. Basically you have a portion of Call of Duty World at War, which was pretty good; Medal of Honor Rising Sun, which was not so good; and then there's Pacific Assault. I have to say of the three, Pacific Assault is best. It does have some flaws. Despite being released a year after the original Call of Duty, the control scheme here is a little clunky, I had to remap the aim down the sights function to my right mouse button to make it easier. Also, sometimes the hitboxes don't register perfectly. Squad AI, particularly the corpsman, doesn't always work well. Still, the gameplay is pretty fun. Graphics for the time are good, and you really feel like you are in the jungle - the atmosphere is very well done. The story is solid too - you will experience Pearl Harbor, the Makin Raid, Guadalcanal, and Tarawa. If you've watched HBO's the Pacific - you will feel like they did a good job of capturing the feel of the war here, it felt very much like that show. Overall, while flawed and not as good as Allied Assault, this is very fun WWII shooter and on sale is well worth the price of admission. If you enjoyed Allied Assault, and old school Call of Duty 1 + 2, you should give this a try.

This game is even in medium mode in some situations hard to play. Story telling and the feeling of being part of the history motivate. Therefore you will reload your savegame and be more careful next time. This first person shooter is sometimes very tactical, sometimes you will only stay alive by playing like Rambo. In general you should duck and take cover behind boxes, barrels or other barriers. AI works intelligent most of the time, they try to surround you, throw grenades and cover behind barriers. When enemies are near to you and have no ammo left, they try to attack you with their bayonets. Rather than the intelligent enemies your comrads behave sometimes very dumb, are blocking your path and do not fire on enemies, even when they look face to face. The very good story, a very realistic sound environment and a good integration of movies motivate to keep playing to the end. Unfortunateley, the end was not as glorious as i'd expect from this kind of historic oriented shooter, it comes very sudden and leaves the player behind with questions. I expected story telling would not end before the war is won. Graphics is ok for a game of 2004, even when it's not the best. Story and level design will direct you very intense, the game design is not intended to interact with the environment. Linear story and scripted action events keep the level of action high.

Especially after the very good Allied Assault. This game consists mostly of walking through jungle corridors, picking off enemy soldiers one by one by hugging cover like your life depends on it (because it literally does) as you slowly crawl forward, lest you get surprised from the side and die pretty much instantly to hitscan hell. If you do not utilize cover, you will die. Period. The game seems to be set up in a way that when you are ducking behind an object, enemies simply can't physically hit you. The moment your center mass is not in cover, you are hosed down nearly instantly with a hitscan storm from out of nowhere. Meaning most of the fights will have you hugging the rock/stump of your choosing, usually crouched and simply leaning out to the left and right to take potshots at the enemy, before immediately ducking into cover again. Leaning out is safe as your center mass remains in cover and is pretty much the only way to safely shoot the enemy without dying. As company, you have a squad of goons with pretty much braindead AI, whose only saving grace is that they are immortal and get up constantly from being downed. I am fairly convinced you could go through the game just camping behind something in a fight and wait for the goons to kill everything (it'd take a while though). Which is not a good thing. Commanding them is basically pointless and it doesn't really seem to do anything. What's worse, the game's healing is mostly depends on one of these goons, namely the medic. He has a limited number of heals per level for you (depending on difficulty) and can "attempt" to revive you if you are downed. I say attempt, because the AI is so braindead, he will fail to pathfind to where you are laying 99% of the time before you pass on. Normal medkits are extremely rare for some reason. The game is also filled with scripted sequences. Turret sections, flying sections, cinematic sections, you name it. Most of these are a chore. A painfully average 5.5/10.

I can only assume this game was developed in response to pc gamers who wanted a Rising Sun port. Yes there is a Pearl Harbor mission where you ride around in a boat and shoot planes, but that's where the similarities between this and RS end. The rest of the game devolves into walking through nearly identical jungles, shooting away at shrubbery, and getting killed a lot by enemies who can see you through grass and bushes.

It's a great game, but it definitely suffers from that mid-2000's video game jank. There are unnecessary difficulty spikes at times, generally when tasked with destroying fighter planes. I played on medium difficulty and these sections would absolutely wipe the floor with me. The game has a very specific way it wants you to destroy the targets and if you deviate from that even slightly, you will die or fail. That's fine, but it can be very difficult to determine "how" the game wants you to play. With this said, it's a twenty year old game at the time of my review, so this kind of thing is to be expected. Aside from this, I love the game. One of the better WWII single-player shooters out there, for sure. Easily worth $10.00.