I originally played MoH Airborne a couple of years ago on normal difficulty and didn't like it. I dropped it after playing it for an hour, however I went back to it on casual mode and I really enjoyed it. Casual mode feels like the game's true difficulty for first time players, you can take more damage and you have more chances to mess up and tank more hits. As a whole, I'd say this is one of the more memorable games in the series, it's just a shame the time period in which it came out in.
A couple of noticable and very welcome additions to Airborne is that health now regenerates up to 4 blocks and each block can regen if you avoid taking enough damage, this is a very good change since now, it feels like a fighting chance when low on health, sure it's still hitscan and not projectile which makes combat not as tense and enjoyable as Resistance Fall of Man but at the same time, if you play carefully enough you can spend a decent amount of time with one or two bars.
Enemies drop health much more often now which makes gunfights making me feel less like a tank that is on borrowed time.
While you have can hold up two rifles and a pistol, the Ratchet and Clank fan in me was losing his mind over the idea of having weapons level up the more they are used and getting new perks upon each upgrade. It did get me to experiment with certain guns a little more, I mostly used the MP40 but I did get some use out of the Springfield and Shotgun too.
I also like how you can only pick up select ammo pick ups and not pick up ammo from dead soliders since now that means I won't primarily be using the MP40.
You can also use a variety of different grenades and they level up too. The anti tank grandes come in handy for later hordes too.
This was in other MoH games but when you aim down sights, you can't actually move while doing it but only lean left to right. Some could take an issue to this especially if they are used to games like CoD but Airboure is where this system finally feels realized. Trying to peak around corners and flanking enemies feels like a reliable tactic and it becomes a life saver towards the end of the game since the enemy count is doubled and shooting while leaning means an enemy will have a harder time trying to hit you. This is especially a useful tactic at close range with the shotgun.
Guns feel pretty weighty and powerful with good sound design and good death animations.
The final big change is what I like is that the game for the most part isn't very scripted. You can parachute and land on any part of the level depending how far you can steer your landing to the ground so if there is an objective you want to complete, you can land to the part where the objective is located and get closer to it all though there are some mandatory parts where you can only respawn at a fixed checkpoint.
However, there are issues with the game. One being rocket launcher enemies and they really suck in this game. You pretty much have to memorize their spawn points or at the very least quickly try to figure out where they are on the map before they fire a rocket and take out 75% of your health, I beat this on casual, I can picture this being infuriating on anything higher. At least snipers have a visual indicator telling you where they are. Rocket enemies can appear out of nowhere and instantly kill you if you don't know where they are.
Rockets have always been a hitscan shooter's protagonist's kryptonite and Airbourne just makes that more obvious.
The MP40 as usual in WW2 tends to be the most dominat weapon especially when upgraded
The final level of the game can be the parachute system pretty infuriating since there is a lot of ground you have to cover before getting to each objective and if you don't have a lot of MP40 ammo lined up, it's going to make mowing down enemies before getting to the objective feel a lot longer to get to. There is an eventual fixed checkpoint but this takes a while to get, and before that, there is a lot of ground to cover before completing an objective.
The explosion at the end did make that final level worth it since it felt like my hardwork eventually paid off.
There are many who like to call the game short, but with that final level, I'd say continuing past it would just be a losing battle since it already felt like the challenge was being pushed to it's limit.
Overall, MoH Airborne as quite a surprise, it's one of my favorite games in the series and it's one of the last good ones before the series tried to turn itself into Call of Duty and made extremely sub par scripted campaigns in the vein of those games.Updated 4 Secs Ago
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