The combat leaves a lot to be desired as well. Fighting in Airborne is a rather “murky” endeavor. “Murky” because the controls are so scattered across the Xbox 360 controller that it is a struggle to just be able to remember how to crouch, lean, and lob a grenade in one smooth motion. Instead, the gamer will find themselves looking at the controller to remember which combination switches weapons. For example, there are now two sets of controls to switch between guns and grenades, instead of being able to efficiently scroll from gun to grenade with a single button. The player will frequently find themselves accidentally running into a room filled with machine guns with a potato-masher instead of the Thompson that they wanted. As nice as it is to be able to choose weapons loadouts at the beginning of each mission, actually getting to those weapons makes combat a very frustrating ordeal.
Medal of Honor has had a time-honored tradition of pushing the envelope with graphical prowess and ingenuity from generation to generation. This time around, while when using a heavily modified Unreal 3 engine, Airborne is severely lacking the style and panache that a proper next-gen title deserves. Even in 1080P high-definition, textures are blurry and lines are terribly jaggy. Animations for cinematic sequences are clunky and “puppet-like”, with over-exaggerated gestures and awkward mouth movements. The only great things graphically about Airborne are the explosions. The particle and fire effects are vibrant and dramatic, which makes the gamer yearn to blow more things up for aesthetics, because the rest of the game certainly isn’t cutting it.
So what’s to say about Airborne? It’s Medal of Honor to be certain, so if readers are looking for yet another round of that, then Airborne won’t disappoint. However, it just feels like the people at Electronic Arts are running out of ideas very quickly. The innovations alone in Airborne do not make a worthy successor to the franchise. Not by a long shot. Especially not when the controls, graphics, and presentation have been otherwise neglected in the face of being able to jump out of a plane.
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