Medal of Honor and I go way back

Warfighter, what am I going to do with you? I had such high hopes of the time we would spend together. Ever since I laid my hands upon you at E3 this year, I’ve been fluttering my eyelashes at you from afar.

But now that I’ve spent time alone with you, caressed you, tried to tease open your secrets, I just, I just don’t feel happy. I feel... I feel dirty. And unsatisfied.

Developer Danger Close’s second installment in the Medal of Honor reboot was supposed to be a step up from the first. It was supposed to bring gamers back to the realistic world of war, where the action was intense, and the fighting was fast.

It does none of those things. In fact, it does precisely the opposite. This game is a step backward. It is a mistaken blot of a title. It is so fist-clenchingly frustrating that it makes me angry. But my anger has quickly slunk into sadness, making me ponder whether I should give up on the entire franchise.

That’s a big call. Medal of Honor and I go way back. We grew up together. But if this is the best Danger Close have to offer, well, maybe its time to end the affair.

Warfighter’s biggest and most immediate problem is its complete lack of depth and narrative. You play in the shoes of a jarhead called “Preacher”. He might be from the first game, but I’m not sure. I really can’t remember. In any event the title makes no attempt to link the game to the background and history of its forebear. Preacher is chaperoned around various hotspots by “Mother”, the ubiquitous bearded special forces soldier with a cricket umpires cap and a Captain Price beard. As far as I could tell, that’s it. There is literally nothing new to see here.

Both Preacher and Mother appear to be dude-bros so tight, they think nothing of shacking up together in hot and heavy hotspots around the world — from Somalia to the Philippines. These environments look nice, and you can blow them to smithereens with lots of high-tech, and ultimately familiar weaponry. But you’d hardly know why — and that a good game does not make.

Throughout the confusion, Preacher and Mother have got each other’s back. Sure, theres lots of hoo-ah, roger-niner, check your six, and eyes on me, but as to what they are doing in all these places, and why you the player should care, I couldn’t tell you. Because the game never tells me.

Maybe it’s something to do with Islamic insurgents, train bombs, international terrorism, and tired racist stereotypes about Middle-Eastern otherness. Or I could be confusing its narrative set up with a thousand other military shooters pumped on the juiced-up high of American exceptionalism. Or, maybe there’s no need for conjecture. Because it's both of those things.

Sure, there are quieter moments. Moments where Danger Close has tried to show its soft side. But the cut scenes where Preacher wrestles with both his conscience and his loved ones only come across as forced and contrived. And they are as poorly animated as they are acted. Part of that’s down to empty writing. In an early scene Preacher’s wife intones “why won’t you let me in” before Preacher hangs the phone up on her. Let her in to what? His cliched war-ravaged psyche? His battles with post-traumatic stress disorder? The mind boggles. By keeping us out of that stultifying experience Preacher is probably doing us a favour.