Medal of Honor: Allied Assault - Breakthrough

The Axis powers are at it again. A new Medal of Honor game is spoiling their plans...

I completed Medal of Honor: Allied Assault - Breakthrough in merely five hours. This only goes to further cement EA’s reputation for milking their franchises for all they’ve got. This expansion has certainly been squeezed dry enough to make Bedouins run away in horror.

This is the second expansion pack for 2002’s brilliant Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. It adds eleven single-player maps, divided into three missions, in addition to the new “Liberation” multiplayer mode with nine maps, twelve new weapons and twenty-five new skins. The add-on, of course, requires the original Medal of Honor: Allied Assault in order to work.

Soldiers in sandstorms

One of the few innovations is the mine detector. But it is only used once in the entire game.

Breakthrough takes place during the WWII battles in Northern Africa and Italy and you assume the role of Sgt. John Baker, a member of the US 34th Division, also know as the Red Bull Division. A fitting name, given the anachronistic associations with a certain energising soft drink, since Baker certainly doesn’t get much sleep during the course of events. You will be taking part in some of the most furious battles of the war, namely the battles at Kasserine Pass in Tunisia, Monte Cassino and Anzio. Five hours of gruesome ordeals later you will have defeated an entire German/Italian division by yourself...

The climax of the game: Bizerte Canal.

The new missions are entirely in the spirit of the main game, which is why you’ll find yourself in familiar grand assaults (like the fabled one on Omaha Beach), defense missions, agent missions and berserker missions - in which you alone end the military careers of dozens of Italians and Germans in no time at all. Sadly, the latter style of mission is dominant in Breakthrough and there are actually only two of the eleven missions I can personally vouch for. These are the missions in Bizerte Canal followed by Bizerte Harbour, in the Tunisian part of the expansion pack. The former has you crossing a canal and then taking control of a small fort that holds British POWs. You then meet an agent and the two of you must escape the Germans in a very exciting sequence. The latter mission has you infiltrating a cargo ship, 007-style.

Whatever happened to your design philosophy, guys?

Breakthrough is too much of a traditional FPS for its own good.

The original Medal of Honor team is working on Call of Duty for Activision now and that may be the reason why Breakthrough seemingly moves away from the core philosophy of the original game, which was meant to simulate the war from a foot soldier’s point of view. The US Medal of Honor organisation cooperated with the developers to this end and they succeeded.

Breakthough, however, deviates from this formula and often ends up as nothing more than a plain vanilla action shooter, in which you just mindlessly charge the enemy on your own. Even though you do meet friendly soldiers along the way, there’s really nothing you can do to save them from their unavoidable scripted deaths.

Furthermore, some of the missions are nigh on impossible until you’ve loaded the game enough times to know the enemies’ movement patterns, a gameplay device that harkens back to earlier generations of shooters. It’s about as much fun as reading the telephone book.

Save your ammo

At Anzio, you need to detroy the Germans' huge railroad-cannons.

I completed Medal of Honor: Allied Assault again no more than a couple of weeks ago. This made me aware of a big difference between the original and the new expansion pack. Breakthough certainly does not contain a smorgasbord of ammunition. In fact, you will need to painstakingly save up your ammo, seeing that there’s not much of it lying around and the enemy soldiers rarely drop anything when killed. During the aforementioned Bizerte Canal mission, I actually ran completely out of ammunition – even my pistol was empty. I wound up having to begin all over again, this time making sure I didn’t fire a single unnecessary round. This is actually a very nice detail, which also stops the player from ending up with more ammo than the entire US Army.

Though I wasn’t very impressed by the new levels, it must be stated that Breakthough has some very interesting new weapons. First and foremost we have the incredibly cool Lee Enfield No.4 MK1(T) sniper rifle. It’s a very quick-loading firearm, almost on par with semi-automatic weapons, and with its ten-round magazine it’s much more efficient than any of the rifles in the original game. Honourable mentions also include the British PIAT anti-tank bazooka and the Beretta Model 34 handgun. At least Breakthough is no disappointment when it comes to weapons.

Execution awaits

if you lose in the new Liberation multiplayer mode, you and your team get executed.

The all-new Liberation multiplayer mode is perhaps the best reason why Medal of Honor fans should invest in this expansion pack. It’s a quite interesting innovation in multiplayer gaming. When your teammates are killed in battle they go to prison and you must try to free them again. This leads to dramatic scenes where players run the gauntlet towards prison cells, cheered on by their mates and covered in enemy fire. When one team is completely incarcerated, players get to see them being executed by a firing squad.

Technically, it’s beginning to show that Medal of Honor: Allied Assault is based on the somewhat dated Quake III engine. Compared with newer titles, Breakthough really isn’t a looker and when put alongside upcoming games, well... we’re harder to impress these days. It has its moments, but nothing more.

A few hours of fun, in spite of everything

The Quake III engine shows its age. You'll be seeing lots of these familiar clipping errors.

Thanks to the high level of difficulty, the great array of new weapons, the Liberation multiplayer maps and a few high points in the single player campaign, Breakthough does have some quality entertainment to offer after all. However, unless you’re a die-hard Medal of Honor gamer, the content of this expansion pack doesn’t justify the price of admission. There’s way too little substance, the ending is a total letdown, the singleplayer campaign offers nothing new, the graphics aren’t all that hot anymore and to be frank, you get way too little for your money. Personally, I’m saving my money for Call of Duty, due out in less than a month. There's a game that offers far more engrossing action than Breakthough could ever aspire to.

Translated by Jonatan A. Allin (neonwolf)