Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault war game

Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault (2004)

Categories: first person shootersinfantry gameslanding troops gamessniper games

Next game of Medal of Honor series, this time presenting the Pacific theater of World War 2. Together with Private Conlin we see the naval landing at Tarawa, where he... more or less dies. And then the actions starts. No, not as zombie, in flashbacks we return to his basic training and his first assignment - at Pearl Harbor, just in time to see Japanese planes sinking the US Pacific Fleet. After that we take part in the raid on Makin Island and the heavy fights during Guadalcanal campaign.

The idea to switch from Europe to Pacific was a good one, or rather it would have been if the creators would have enough original ideas for the plot... which they haven’t. The areas we are fighting in are exotic comparing to European theater, but after a while they actually become rather boring - afterall the diversity of terrain on Pacific islands is rather symbolic. Interesting missions would be a great addition, but... unfortunately they are not - the opponents are using same tactics, same weapons, same tricks throughout the whole game. Comparing to facing German tanks, planes, artillery in previous games here we have Japanese infantry, Japanese infantry and ambushes made by Japanese infantry.

Overall it was original idea for a war game - there were very little games about land operations during war on Pacific. There were always flight simulators, sub simulators, strategy games, but not many people were trying to show the tough fight of land forces. As we know after Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault obviously there was a reason behind it - all the Pacific islands look more or less the same, the weather is more or less the same, there was very little difference between the land operations in 1941 and 1945. Just take a look on TV series "Band of Brothers" and "Pacific" to clearly see how exciting and different were the battles in Europe and how monotonous were the operations on Pacific.