Medal of Honor: Warfighter reviewDishonoured? By Dan Whitehead Published 24 October, 2012Warfighter sounds like a joke. It's the sort of ludicrously macho title you'd expect to find on a mischievous Grand Theft Auto parody of first-person military shooters, or perhaps a cheesy Rainier Wolfcastle movie in The Simpsons. What's really disappointing is that either of those options would be more entertaining than what's ended up on this disc.That Medal of Honor: Warfighter is utterly generic and devoid of personality doesn't come as much of a surprise. Clearly dusted off to fill the years when DICE can't provide EA with a new Battlefield game, Medal of Honor's rebirth as a khaki placeholder is now complete. This is not a game that seeks to challenge or innovate. It's here to give you exactly what you expect and nothing more. Yet even when following in the footsteps of others, it can't help tripping over its own boots.The story finds you hopping from one Tier One operative to another across a fragmented time frame as you close in on The Cleric, a shadowy terrorist leader who should in no way be taken as a stand-in for Bin Laden. You pop up in Pakistan, Yemen, Dubai and Sarajevo to take down evil Muslims, Somalian pirates and swarthy Eastern Europeans. Stark captions tell you that events happened SIX WEEKS AGO or EIGHTEEN HOURS LATER - but none of it adds up to anything compelling, or even coherent.
The war that broke the camel's backMedal of Honor: Warfighter is a funny name. Yes, "Warfighter" is a term with a real-life military application, but that doesn't stop it from sounding incredibly silly. It is gratuitously macho, not to mention rather redundant. It is, however, a perfectly fitting name for one of the many annual "me too" military first-person shooters that hit the market toward the end of the year. It is, in fact, the perfect name for Danger Close's latest offering. If Warfighter is anything, it's as gratuitous as it is redundant.Medal of Honor: Warfighter takes the uniformity of the military FPS to its logical, strained conclusion. In both its single-player campaign and competitive online mode, it is a "Who's Who" of every overplayed stereotype the genre has to offer. Crossing off an invisible checklist of must-have features, Warfighter plays it absolutely safe, doing very little to rock the boat, but even less to capture the imagination.First things first, the single-player mode is abysmal. For the most part, it's another common romp through the Middle East and other war-torn parts of the world, as players hide behind crates and shoot at silhouettes spawning across murky arenas of nondescript space. So linear and formulaic is each mission, it comes across less like the "EXTREME REALISM" of modern combat and more like a cheap, slow fairground ride.
