Just when it seemed that fighting Nazi hordes to save Europe was over. Just when you thought “I will never play another WW2 shooter”. Another one comes along and we couldn’t resist it. I am a big fan of WW2 shooters but have grown tired of the genre, then along comes Medal of Honor Airborne and I believe once again. The MOH series of games has been pushed aside by Call of Duty in recent as the premier WW2 shooter. With COD moving to a modern combat genre MOH has picked a perfect time to change up the system and give us a pretty darn good game.

The first thing that you’ll notice is that the levels are free roaming, no more point A to point B only. Its a welcome change and can make the game playable multiple times. You’ll also be able to parachute into any part of the battlefield. While landing in an intense fire fight can make your survival tough it can also give you the needed advantage. The ability to land anywhere, such as roofs, into blown open buildings and enemy bunkers makes for different gameplay each time as well as perfect sniping posts (if your into sniping as I am). When landing behind enemy lines make sure you nail your landing or it will be a short life for you.

Also the game allows you to pick what weapons load-out you want before you deploy. It has a small arsenal at first including some German weapons and as you pick up weapons they will be added to your load-out screen so you can start with them. This leads me to personally one of my favorite things and that is the weapons upgrades. This caused me to play the game through multiple times as getting these upgrades is quite addicting. You can get the upgrades by using each weapon to remove a Nazi from the game. Granted while some of the upgrades don’t seem to do much, some of them are great such as the addition of scopes, larger mags, and bayonets.

The levels are done well and really make you feel like you’re in old world Europe. They aren’t extremely large so navigating them is easy. Although the last level is a bit of a maze and I admit to getting lost a couple of times.

As with most WW2 games the AI leaves a bit to be desired. While the Nazi’s are fierce and will not run away they also will not move to and from cover very often so getting a sight on them isn’t all that difficult. The Nazi’s are also split up into classes and the lower the class the less battle hardened they are and thus easy to dispose of. The top of the Nazi food chain are the Nazi Elite, they are well armored soldiers with MG 42 machine guns that they carry around and are quite hard to take down (aim for the head). This was a nice addition. The AI of your teammates is awful as usual. It is nice to have multiple guys around so the bad guys aren’t just wasting you, and the AI is good for a few kills but more than a couple of times the AI decides to run in front of you just as your tossing a grenade and the grenade comes bouncing off their helmet right back to your feet.

Mutliplayer just seems a bit tacked on and really isn’t all that great. This game would have been a great co-op game and I’d like to see a WW2 game with co-op in the future.

All in all this game did not disappoint in a world where there may already be to many WW2 games. MOH Airborne gives a bit of a twist that makes it better then most recent WW2 games. With Call of Duty leaving the WW2 game behind and if your just itching to waste some of those easy to hate Nazi’s this game is worth picking up.