World War II has been a gaming subject on every major hardware platform since Atari rolled out the 2600, and it seems like the Medal of Honor series has been present along with it. EA’s latest effort, Medal of Honor Heroes 2, doesn’t shake anything up in regards to mission structure and combat mechanics, but does provide the best first person controls on the Wii yet. These controls, combined with a casual, Wii Zapper supported, light-gun arcade mode and a 32 person online mode makes this retread of Nazi shooting worth a look from any Wii owner.
An OSS agent’s work is never done, and in this installment you’ve got a lot on your plate. Hitler’s been playing with rockets again and has come up with quite the doozy, the V2, capable of dropping an atomic payload on anyone who doesn’t agree with his drive to annex Europe. It’s up to you to gather intelligence, sabotage the rocket program and shoot any Nazi foolish enough to get in your way. Mission briefings are told through cutscenes at the beginning of each level as well as through radio briefings delivered via radio once you find them and then lock on to the super secret OSS frequency. Both the mission briefings as well as the intelligence briefings are done very well with a photo style animation for the mission briefings, and excellent voice work throughout. Intelligence briefings are audio only, but offer excellent voice work as well.
The mission structure is common World War II fare. There’s the bombed out city mission, the sewer mission, the secret base mission, the church mission, all places you’ve no doubt traversed in previous efforts to stem the Axis tide. In the usual Medal of Honor style, missions have primary objectives which must be finished and optional secondary objectives, some of which you’ll be told about outright, some of which you’ll stumble upon.
Despite the familiar mission objectives, the gameplay never gets boring as the game throws a huge number of enemies at you. This is not a game where you can sit back and take pot shots in the hopes that eventually you’ll take everyone out and can then merrily stroll up to the next building. Enemies will continue to respawn forcing you to move quickly, yet tactically, taking cover and firing when the opportunity allows.
The AI will take cover, and throw grenades to flush you out, but that’s about it. Rarely do they flank, or try and rush you, and when they do, they’ll often run right past you only to get shot in the back. Sometimes they get a bit too wedded to their cover, choosing to stay completely still as you come up alongside them and blast them with your shotgun. Despite the bad AI, the game is still challenging due to the fact that the enemies are pretty good shots and can hit you from quite a distance away. Finding cover is essential as taking cover is the only way to replenish your health. Saving is done via a checkpoint system, and the game could have used a few more as you may find yourself doing the same objectives over and over again as you attempt to traverse particularly hairy sections.
The game provides a nice variety of weapons. You can carry two weapons at a time, including grenades and the weapons are the usual WWII fare. Pistols, submachine guns, rifles, sniper rifles, assault rifles and even bazookas are all available at different points in the game. Thankfully, the ammo boxes you find sprinkled throughout the levels offer multi-purpose ammo, which is helpful as many times, the German weapons offer more of a punch than their American counterparts.
Good weapons are nothing if the control scheme isn’t there, and thankfully, this is one area where the game excels. Rather than going the route of providing a one-size-fits-all control scheme, EA decided to let the player customize the control scheme. Players can set the size of the bounding box, the imaginary box that determines where on the screen moving the cursor to will cause the player to turn, as well as the aim sensitivity and the horizontal and vertical look speed. The result is a completely customizable experience on par with what you’d expect in most PC keyboard and mouse combos. Experienced shooter vets can make the bounding box as small as possible and crank up the sensitivity and look speed and shoot their twitchy little hearts out. While it would have been nice to have some presents present to give gamers of various experience levels a place to start tweaking from, it doesn’t take long to get a setup that you’re comfortable with.
With the Elite control scheme, shooting is done via the B button, however to really nail those headshots, you’ll need to press the A button to look down your gun sight. When in this move, twisting the nunchuk allows you to lean out of cover. Along with shooting, the game provides a nice mix of gesture based controls, which, with one exception, all work well. Say you come across a U-boat that’s just itching to be blown up, simply twist the Wiimote clockwise as if you’re turning the dial on a timer and then pull the WIimote back once the timer has been set. A similar motion is used to set your zoom level when sniping, and in a welcome addition, once the appropriate level of magnification is achieved, you can press the C button to lock in the zoom. The most fun however is with the bazooka. To enable the aiming mode with the bazooka you take the Wiimote and turn it upside down so that it’s resting on your shoulder, as if you had picked up a real bazooka. You then move the aiming reticle with the thumbstick on the nunchuk and fire with the b button. It’s hokey but it’s fun as all heck. The only thing that doesn’t work well is the use of mounted machine guns, which requires moving the Wiimote and nunchuk together and often times ends up with you taking a dirt nap behind the sandbags.
