Medal of Honor: Rising Sun review

Medal of Honor: Rising Sun - on course for a Christmas number one.

A Medal of Honor is something to be respected. Each one in existence represents a surviving soldier from WWII and it is a symbol of what can be achieved when we work together against the evils of the world. They have been awarded to a countless number of men over the years, yet that in no way diminishes their significance of man’s constant struggle with itself.

In light of this, it is perhaps quite sad that Electronic Arts are in danger of cheapening the Medal of Honor name to a new generation of young people. This Xmas sees the company release what seems to be the billionth iteration of its long running franchise of WWII themed first person shooters. The adage goes that you cannot have too much of a good thing and EA certainly see it that way with the Medal of Honor series. The last console release drew a lot of criticism from many quarters and you start to wonder if EA only understand 'a good thing' if it is money going into their pockets.

Love to Hate

Rising Sun, falling standards

The game starts off with the attack on Pearl Harbour. There is no title screen and no pressing start - you watch an FMV sequence of the ships being attacked in the port and the ensuing chaos inside the vessels themselves. All of a sudden you are given control of a marine and you have to escape from the ship before it is ripped apart. Once you escape to the surface you get a glimpse of the horrors that must have been experienced back in 1941, as you take command of an anti-aircraft gun and shoot down as many of the incoming planes as you can. A final explosion on the ship sends you flying into the water, forcing you to scramble onto a passing boat. Moving among the wreckage and debris, you once again man a heavy gun placement and have to shoot down all the enemy planes as they go past.

This initial opening level is actually rather good and despite everything looking very ropey it’s quite immersive and impressive. Unfortunately, this is the best part of the game and it all goes downhill rather quickly, almost straight away.

First up on the chopping block are the graphics. They are complete... And utter... Utter... Arse. It looks like a PS one game running on a PS2 using the texture-filtering feature. The cheap gimmicks used here are appallingly bad and hark back to things that developers did with their first couple of 3D games back in 1996. Amazingly, all the explosions in this game are displayed using flat, 2D sprites. Which is almost hilarious. Remember back playing Doom when a power up on the floor would always look the same no matter what angle you looked at it? You could circle-strafe round a shotgun on the floor and you would always be looking at it from the side? You get the same effect here.

Sunday Prep

The only good bit of the game - the very first level.

That is exactly what the explosions in Rising Sun are like and it is just pitiful. The cardboard scenery is even worse and looks less convincing than a Sunday School nativity play. The tree textures look like they were rendered from a bunch of school-trip bark rubbings. Even the cut scenes are grainy rubbish and I am almost certain that when you throw a grenade they are 2D sprites. And even then they don't always explode once thrown.

The sound is a two-faced affair with some very good music and rather drab sound effects. Many of the gun sounds are rather poor and your squad members are rather silent once they have finished saying their scripted lines.

The PS2 pad has never been much good for FPS games and this is made even worse by the awful controls. The button layout is fine but the aiming is atrocious and there is even a delay between you moving the stick and it happening on screen. This makes any kind of circle strafing almost impossible, so you end up shooting the bad guys whilst standing still. Another example of the low production values is the AI for both the enemy and your squad. Quite frankly it is just embarrassing when they start running around each other trying to hit thin air with their rifle butts and then sprinting three foot just so they can turn around and shoot. Oh, and watching an enemy soldier duck behind thin air for cover is very odd the first few times you see it as well.

Perhaps the thing that made me splutter the most was watching enemy troops spring out from nowhere and this is most blatant when you come across a fortified gun position. You could stand in front of one of these guns for five minutes and no soldiers would appear. The moment you press the X button to use that gun though, they suddenly swarm in from everywhere. I mean seriously - is this 1983 or 2003...?

An Odd Pain

Please... Kill me.

There was the odd occasion when I thought that I was getting into the game as there are one or two bits that I found faintly interesting. Tellingly though, whenever I died I simply could not be bothered to go back through it. It's almost painful to look at and play.

Rising Sun is one of the most blatant examples of a publisher-game rather than a developer-game, ever seen. I get the feeling that the developers had some great ideas for the game, but were only allocated limited resources and time to get it all completed. EA's current slogan for their adverts is "EA games - challenge everything". I feel that "EA games - rehash everything" would be more appropriate. It is as if Halo, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and Call of Duty never existed. Quite frankly, this is just pure crap.

Lastly, even the online mode is pretty rushed with only deathmatch and team deathmatch modes on offer. What went wrong?