Medal of Honor Beta – First Impressions

I’m trying very hard to focus on the positives here. It is a bit difficult, I know that it’s a beta, but there are some problems that really shouldn’t be in a beta – they should have been picked up in QA prior to any public launch (closed or not).

So I’m going to get the negative bits off my chest first otherwise I’ll just be sugar coating them.

1 – Freezing – when playing as Afghan/Local/Insurgent if you check the scrore screen during spawn the PS3 freezes, if you score 40 points with your gun the PS3 freezes. I think it may be an anti-terrorist measure, but it’s definitely annoying and worrying too. I don’t want my PS3 freezing! What happens if it freezes and the magic smoke escapes – I’m pretty sure that in the T&Cs I agreed to to play the Beta there would have been a section that says something like: “Your PS3 may explode, we accept no responsibility for such situations….” so I’m thinking that either I’m not going to play the Beta until this issue is resolved, or just not play as the locals. Which brings us nicely on to….

2 – Unbalanced Teams – it seems that the only people who actually choose to play as the locals, or let the system choose for them are the new players like me. The freezing issue means that people are opting NOT to play on the locals side, and those that do get frozen out of the game as soon as they manage to string a couple of kills together. So you end up with hugely unbalanced games. I thought it was just DICE’s awesome team balancing effort again, but on ponderation the reason is now clear (see 1 above).

3 – Arse Backward Weapons – Weapons that should be strong are weak and vice versa. Especially the tank – it’s redundant and pointless.

4 – Non-destructible environments and pointless vehicles – I don’t understand the reasoning for having indestructible environments, especially when you have tanks in the mix. Fair enough don’t have guns damaging buildings, but RPGs and tank rounds should damage them, or at least injure people hiding behind them. Do I really have to get a perfect headshot with a tank against someone hiding behind a MUD BRICK wall before they can fire a rocket at me from their impenetrable fortress of dust? Come on, it’s ridiculous. Almost as ridiculous as the vehicles themselves. The tanks should really just be stationary heavy MGs or something as the maps make it that you can’t go anywhere in them anyway. The maps are too small and the battle areas are too cramped for tanks.

I think that’s the negative bits out of the way…. so on with the positives:

It looks nice.

It also rewards players who put the time in with godly powerful weapons, but that’s a bit moot if EA/DICE continue with their pay-to-boost business model.

As andresparra said to me about the game: “it combines all that the Battlefield fanboys hate about COD with all that the COD fanboys hate about the Battlefield saga”. I think that fairly sums it up in its current state.

Let’s not forget that this is still in the Beta stage so any and all of the negative aspects will probably change. It’ll be interesting to see the difference between this beta and the demo (if they bring a demo out) or the full game. Currently I don’t see this game being high on my list of games to buy. You can’t be all things to all people and this is what Medal of Honor is attempting to be.

Peas and loaves.

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