Since a buddy system is heavily emphasized in Warfighter since the beginning, it’s one of those features that players will find useful, especially when you have a friend playing the game with you. In Fireteam buddy, whenever you have someone playing with you, you can join forces together in eliminating enemies. At an event you die and your buddy on the party is still alive, you have an option to respawn back at the base, or you can respawn right beside your buddy. Also, whenever one needs ammunition, players can simply run to their buddy and give them one.
NOT
Weak AI
In the first Medal of Honor, one of the problems everyone had was the weak AI in the single player portion. Well in Warfighter, you can expect the same problem to exist. Through the several chapters in the game, you will notice that the AI of the enemies are still weak as they will simply run towards you, or hide from cover for a long time. The AI itself is not balanced and it makes the game somewhat less challenging even on the hardest difficulty. Most of the time, you can see enemies just standing around doing nothing, while others will be going back and forth from cover. For someone who have played a lot of shooters, they will be disappointed with Warfighter’s AI.
Inconsistent Texture Popping/Visual Glitches
The visuals of Warfighter is decent but it won’t win any awards. Despite using the Frostbyte 2 engine that Battlefield 3 used, there are still some inconsistencies to the amount of texture popping you will encounter. On the Xbox 360 version, you will be recommended to install the HD Texture pack that claims to improve the visuals, making it more clear and crisp. While there is a difference between not having the HD Texture pack installed and having it installed, the texture popping remains prominent. To make it less apparent, installing the whole single player disc on the hard drive will help it ease up but it won’t get rid of the texture pop ups at all. When it comes to glitches, the game has a decent amount of those. Most of the time you will see dead enemies floating around, and some part of the environment will take a while to load. One of the annoying glitches that I’ve encountered is when I’m sniping an enemy and the enemy won’t just die. I restarted the game, and upon attempting it once again to kill it, it worked.
Single Player Gets Dull Quickly
On the first couple of chapters in Warfighter, the excitement of playing and finishing it is there but the moment you reach the middle and nearing to the end of the game, that’s the time you will feel that the game is becoming dull. While Danger Close tries to give fans a variety of ways to finish the single player by adding sniping section, and car chases, you will quickly notice that this is not new at all and this has been seen in a lot of games, primarilyany FPS game and of course Call of Duty. The action that you see will outgrow you very quickly as you will feel that this has been done before.
Short Campaign
Another disappointment that I have in Warfighter is the short campaign. For veterans, the game can easily be finished in around six hours or less. While there is a decent amount of chapters within the game’s campaign mode, some are short and if you are playing on the normal difficulty at the very start, you then can expect it to finish it very quickly. Compared to the first Medal of Honor game, the campaign is much shorter this time around.
VERDICT
While Medal of Honor Warfighter tries to be a must-play game, it simply fails to hit the sweet spots. Instead of raising the bar, the game turned out to be a disappointment in several ways. The campaign mode attempts to bring innovation to the series, but it doesn’t match the first in length or add anything new to the series / genre. If there is one thing that highlights the success of Warfighter, that would be the multiplayer as it has some new things that fans will like. Compared to the recent Medal of Honor reboot, Warfighter is an improvement, although it’s unlikely to overthrow the more popular FPS games.
[Editor’s Note: Medal of Honor Warfighter was reviewed on the Xbox 360. The game was provided to us by the publisher for review purposes.]
