Medal of Honor: Rising Sun | ||
Medal of Honor: Rising Sun Review on PS2 |
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Pacific side of WWII in which you find yourself pitted against the full force of the Japanese war machine. The game begins, as Frontline did, with an impressive action-packed opening scene, this time at Pearl Harbor as the Imperial Japanese Navy launches its sneak attack on the 100 or so US ships and all the American personnel based there. You take on the role of Marine Corporal Joseph Griffen who is rudely woken from his sleep aboard the USS California as the first bombs start dropping. Your ship like many others has been hit and this initial level has you at first frantically rushing past fires and dead comrades in narrow passageways within the ship to get up on deck before it sinks. Once there the massive onslaught is immediately obvious as Japanese planes attack the decks in waves, dropping torpedoes, and filling the sky with gunfire and the smoke from burning vessels. The first scenes or so are some of the best you'll experience throughout the game and although at least half of it is on rails it's quite an impressive visual and an experience that gets you fired up and ready for more. Those that played Frontline will know that the Normandy Beach opening level did much the same to get the adrenaline flowing but then disappointingly eased back the throttle to a less exciting level of action and a smaller scale for the rest of the game. Unfortunately Rising Sun does pretty much the same here and the fantastic build-up and atmosphere at Pearl Harbor just ends up making all the following levels seem quite dull and average by comparison. The game offers 10 missions which contain a fairly good variety of objectives for you to try and achieve behind enemy lines such as blowing up gun emplacements, finding secret documents, infiltrating a secret meeting between Axis partners and sinking a Japanese super-carrier. The thing being though that you don't necessarily have to complete every single one to progress. Also there's the usual well-researched attention to authentic WWII detail that the Medal of Honor series is famous for from the large array of realistic weaponry to nicely recreated uniforms, locations and believable wartime scenarios. All of the important pieces of the Medal of Honor formula are present in Rising Sun, so you may be wondering what's wrong with the game. Basically, it just doesn't work right. Elements of the game just feel extremely clumsy and unfinished, at times, which often makes playing through the missions feel more like a chore than an enjoyable experience. The attempt at realism in the game is also questionable with enemies are often observed behaving in slightly unorthodox ways such as enemy soldiers who ran in place up against walls and enemies who stood motionless and faced the other direction while you noisily take care of their comrades just a few feet away. Some enemies will attack you with lethal intent, but others will simply stand there waiting for you to reload your weapon so you can shoot them in the head. Headshots, however aren't nearly as lethal in Rising Sun as you would expect. You can often pull off what looks like a solid shot to the head or chest with your rifle, only to have the enemy stagger briefly and then continue firing as normal. It can take two or three shots to put him down for good, which doesn't do a lot for the game's attempts at realism. Similarly, a shotgun blast to the legs will sometimes cause an enemy to hop about comically for a moment, and then he'll charge at you at a full sprint. All of these little problems just make the game feel a little sloppy. Prepare for irritation in the form of 'save spots' as They're mostly hidden in out-of-the-way spots like some dead-end side path in the middle of the jungle so unless you go looking for them, often you'll probably just breeze right on by, then if you do manage to get killed mid-mission you'll either have to start it all over again or wind up back at the last-used save point. In terms of graphics, Rising Sun fails to live up to the standard of its predecessors. The weapon and character models look pretty detailed, but the levels are often extremely basic in both artistic and technical aspects. They lack the sheer amount of geometry that other recent First Person Shooter games have used to establish greater detail, and the textures aren't nearly as detailed as they could be. By James Skelton |
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