Medal of Honor 2010 vs 2012?

I was in my car thinking today, which is a pretty common occurrence since I routinely sit in hours upon hours of traffic daily.. but anyway.. randomly a music track from the 2010 Medal of Honor reboot came on.

You can listen to it below:

It got me thinking about how great Medal of Honor (2010) was, and then I was trying to think how they went SO wrong with the 2012 sequel, Medal of Honor – Warfighter.

So I came up with a bulleted list (because everyone loves a bulleted list!)

• #1:  MOH2012 sucked. Yes, it sucked because it sucked. Well maybe not in so many words.. but..

The action was very similar to the original, but the locations were no where near as impressive to me. Lots of little towns, boats, etc. Instead of focusing on one large area, they decided to jump all over the world, which I felt really hurt the level design and story. Seemed like they were trying to copy Call of Duty to an extent.

Graphics were fine, not great, but passable, nothing worse than the original for sure. Some people knocked the game for it’s looks, but for our purposes we’ll ignore those.

• #2:  MOH2012 was not based on ‘real’ history. Even if it was. We all basically knew the story around MOH2010, as it was the invasion of Afghanistan. It was a decade removed, but from the very beginning that game felt like you were going back in time to a VERY important moment in American history. I mean, watch the intro below.. it still literally takes me there. Powerful. Emotional. You know what they’re doing, what they’re talking about.

… and then there is the MOH2012 intro.. which you can see below:

… which tells you basically nothing, other than a cargo ship went KaBoom! Oh, and apparently the enemy little bird is being piloted by Storm Troopers since it can’t hit a damn thing. There is some quasi-emotional conversational dialog from a deployed solider and his wife but.. this is it? Going from taking down Al-Qaeda to .. what? Ugh. Starts literally with a bang, but fizzles pretty quick.

The rest of the game has you searching for evil PETN and generally doing SpecOp’s kinda things. I am certain these missions were based on stuff that actually happened, but that doesn’t make them entertaining or fun. PETN, while generally not good in terrorist hands, is not really a be-all, end-all type of ‘baddy’, so it seems somewhat silly that it is the entire basis of the game.