From last Thursday, people have been able to play the multiplayer beta for EA’s newest game in the Medal Of Honor series, called.. Medal Of Honor. I was able to download it last night, I unfortunately missed the early beta starting on the 17th because I didn’t own Bad Company 2 on Steam. Anyway, yesterday Valve time, the beta unlocked on Steam, which then took about an hour to download (fortunately it was only 800MB), because again EA proved it doesn’t understand what preloading is.

Bearing in mind that this is a beta product, with over three months until release, let’s get stuck in. The first thing that is shown to you is the main menu, which is obviously ported directly from console versions, designed for navigation with a gamepad and with large fonts. Play is obvious. Career contains your ranks, medals, ribbons, and leaderboards, much like Bad Company 2. Options lets you change video settings and adjust your TV display. Exit Game lets you exit the game, I haven’t used this one yet because the game crashes when it thinks I’ve played enough. Let’s hope DICE has the time to improve this for us PC users. Medals and ribbons are awards you can earn in ranked servers, including the Action Commendation you can see below. Each medal or ribbon you earn in-game will increase your score and help you on the way to your next rank, earning you new weapons and attachments.

There are three classes in the game, Rifleman, Spec Ops, and Sniper. Riflemen have assault rifles, grenade launchers (sigh), and can unlock LMGs. Spec Ops have SMGs and rocket launchers. Snipers have sniper rifles, though they start out without a scope, and C4. All pretty generic modern combat shooter stuff, and unfortunately that’s a theme throughout Medal Of Honor, everything you see in this game has been done before, and done by two games. If there ever was an offspring of two games, this would be it. Those games are of course Modern Warfare (2), and Bad Company 2. Running off the Frostbite engine, it looks and feels a lot like Bad Company 2, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but in it’s current state BC2 is a better game, so one could ask oneself what’s the point in Medal Of Honor?

Guns are as close to recoilless as you could get, though EA have said they are going to tweak that during the beta. The two maps available, Kabul City Ruins and Helmand Valley, are too small. Helmand Valley is very linear, there is one capture point at each stage (think BC2 rush map) which focuses all combat on a single point with usually only two paths up to that point, unlike in BC2 where the maps are more open and you have more freedom to flank. Kabul City Ruins is even worse, if I were to draw the map in ASCII, it would look something like this;
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the four empty squares each have a building in it which you can enter, but the map is basically an urban four-square court, and the teams rotate spawn points around the center every few minutes.

Visually, the game looks good, a lot like Bad Company 2 but different enough to be called it’s own game, which is a good thing because they most likely won’t be changing during the beta. Controls are what you’d expect, no prone or lean. Crouch can be toggled (yay), but it doesn’t work yet (aww). DICE is known for poor server browsers, every game they make they seem to forget how to make them and start again from scratch, Medal Of Honor’s server browser is no exception, their worst one yet. Performance for me at least is better than BC2 at high settings, though I was forced to play on DX9 to even start the game, which may be helping my FPS somewhat. I’d like to comment on the kill-streak bonuses, but I haven’t had any yet. Not because I suck, but because the game crashes to desktop whenever I have enough points to obtain one, eagerly awaiting a fix to that one.

While the beta doesn’t make me want to cancel my pre-order immediately, if DICE doesn’t work hard to improve the game over the next three months, I’ll probably save myself £30. There is still the singleplayer game of course, which could turn out to be worth playing. Could.