So I Tried… Medal of Honor Allied Assault

Each edition of So I Tried… I will try a game that I have never tried before. Will I find something new to love? Will I find something new to despise? I'll take a full half hour, no matter how bad it gets or how badly I do, to see if this is the game for me. This time I went for the PC version of Medal of Honor Allied Assault.

What I thought it was

A recent addition to the Medal of Honor franchise, which I played back on the PlayStation as my brother is quite into the history of Britain's wars, which meant they were right up his alley. As a teenager with limited, slow, internet access, I had nothing better to do than play the new games when he wasn’t. After Medal of Honor: Underground, I hadn’t touched the series until now. War games aren’t my thing, but as I got Allied Assault in a bundle I figured I’d install it and see how the games had gone.

What it actually is

More recent than Medal of Honour: Underground, certainly not as recent as I believed. It’s from 2002, but is (from my little research) a well regarded entry into the series. For some reason Origin is unable to render it in 1600x1200 resolution, as it kept crashing, and set everything including sound to low quality, so I played a little longer given the fact I had to futz with the settings quite a bit.
The character models are atrocious in the opening movie, but I honestly found my half hour to be quite good. The friendly AI worked well, the weapons were effective and I was really quite bummed when the squad died, despite it happening in the first few minutes. Despite my initial humour found at the character models as they stormed the beach, I was impressed with the variety of death animations and smiled when I saw the soldiers practicing good trigger technique: finger alongside the trigger instead of inside the trigger guard.

Will I keep playing

I’d like to say I would, but I won’t be. It’s a World War II game and I just can’t do it… History is important, but I’ll leave it to the scholars. At least I can say I’ve played the first three titles out of the 14 that have come out. I don’t know if I just can’t engage with games based on historic events, or if I’ve just got an aversion to war titles in general, but if this had lasers and cyborgs I would be in. Sadly it doesn’t...