Medal of Honor, developed by Danger Close was released October 12th 2010. It had a 3 week head start on Call of Duty Black Ops. Medal of Honor was marketed as a more realistic and not a ridiculous over the top like Modern Warfare 2. If Medal of Honor came out around the same time as MW2, it would have fared a bit better.

In the single player campaign you play as 4 different soldiers, but it seamlessly transitions in a way it seems like you never changed a soldier. The Tier 1 squad consists of the names Preacher, Dusty, Mother, and Rabbit. The game starts off in the Tora Bora mountains. The Tier 1 operators are undercover driving a technical in a town to rescue an informant. At night they get stopped by a shepherd and a dozen goats crossing the road. At first the squadmate shouts in the native dialect to move. Then after a long time of 5 seconds, the Tier 1 operative yells “Move!” in English like no Taliban soldier would ever notice.
A special forces soldier undercover would never yell in English in any Middle Eastern, Central Asian conflict. Within the first 5 minutes I was stunned.

When the Tier 1 Ops, get to the informant, they pull guns on him. They did this to make sure if the informant lead them into a set up. The informant tells the soldiers that The Taliban are bad people and he wants his daughter to grow up and get an education. All the Taliban does in the context of the game is terrorize the locals. This is one of the rare times Taliban is actually mentioned in the game. Throughout the game Tier 1, US Marines, and helicopter pilots refer to the Taliban as “bad guys”. Not tangos, but bad guys. Danger Close couldn’t make it any more black and white.

The US invade the Bagrams airforce base. What makes this odd, is that the takeover of Bagrams was a joint op of US and UK special forces. While Danger Close mentioned multiple times that they consulted with the Tier 1 Special Forces, it seems like Danger Close gave them full control of script writing.

In the game the Colonel in Bagrams airforce base wants to use tactical strikes to slowly weaken the Taliban, but the clueless General in Washington D.C. that has no idea what’s going on in Afghanistan wants to send marines. The missions consists of destroying Taliban ammo caches, bunkers, installations, getting ambushed, and a rescue mission. There isn’t a good sense of mission pacing of rising conflict, climax, and resolution compared to call of Duty. Due to the success of Modern Warfare’s All Ghillied Up, Danger Close tries to implement stealth in some later missions, but it never has the same effect. The mission pacing is as clueless as the US military main purpose in Afghanistan. The last mission of Medal of Honor just ends. There is no change in pacing such as a massive firefight to indicate the end.

While the game tried to be a grounded, and have a serious tone, the Linkin Park music washed all that away. There was two Linkin Park songs used in Medal of Honor. One of the on rail helicopter scene and one for the end.  It was strange that they licensed Linkin Park when they already had an acclaimed hollywood composer. The end credits of Medal of Honor has a long over the top tribute to US veterans.



My first time reading the slides, I remembered what Chris Antista said in October 2010. “Without your sacrifices we wouldn’t been able to make this game.” I was recalling information of the TalkRadar hosts in Episode 123. Tyler Wilde was not making an exaggeration about the ending deifies the troops. Tier 1 consultants basically were given free reign of the story. After playing Medal of Honor, I don’t understand that Medal of Honor accurately depicts what the actions of the Special Operation Forces. The Tier 1 could do nothing wrong, and the Marines barely caught breaks. Medal of Honor comes off way more propagandized compared to the Call of Duty Modern Warfare games because it never uses real historical events as a setting for their games.

Setting the game based upon real life conflict was a bit tasteless. It wasn’t pulled off that well. The Taliban could have been called opposing force and it would have made no difference. While it tried to be serious, it never fully committed to the tone. It is sad that one of the most influential and creative series in World War II shooters got rebooted to be the pinnacle of this generation generic contemporary military shooter.