War once required scores of young men to butcher one another on muddy fields for months. Now a lone lunatic can paralyze a city with an explosive vest. Lucky for us, it also takes just a few highly trained specialists to foil a terrorist's madness via some first-person shooting.
Warfighter's campaign kicks off with the promising clatter of exploding containers and toppling cranes at a doomed Pakistani pier. For a few minutes, the whole world comes apart at the seams. This amounts to premature exhilaration, though: while the graphics stay sharp, the solo campaign never gets anywhere near as exciting again. Mildly entertaining diversions pepper the five-hour trudge through exotic locations like the Philippines and Mogadishu, including an obligatory turn at a helicopter's minigun and some surprisingly polished car and boat chases. But the remainder devolves into a worn-out, whack-a-mole, shoot-and-sprint grind against waves of pirates and generic terrorists.
You'll also roll your eyes at cloying cutscenes that never bother to introduce a worthwhile villain, and are instead crammed with insulting caricatures of unhappy military wives. We'll acknowledge it takes a rare breed to succeed in the special forces, but the personifications of dutiful male devotion are too one-dimensional to be human, much less heroic. By the time the whole affair collapses into a teary-eyed tribute to fallen comrades, and enemy forces start appearing as if out of thin air, you'll wonder why you bothered.
Multiplayer at least stirs in a couple of interesting ideas. Whether you're capturing a flag or controlling a zone, both teams are divided into five fireteam duos. These partnerships are powerful: you can see your pal through walls, get partial credit for his kills, and resurrect him immediately if you avenge his death fast enough. Six distinct classes amplify the effect, too. For example, a Demolition expert sports heavy armor and plants bombs quickly, but his Spec Ops partner’s temporary X-ray vision is what'll save him from rushing into an ambush.
As you gain ranks, you'll unlock everything from scopes and stocks to magazines and muzzles, but too few of the upgrades have an appreciable impact on performance, and the clunky interface makes experimenting with different parts a pain. The real threat to Warfighter's longevity, though, is how its multiplayer maps feel like patchworks of arbitrary buildings and debris instead of bona fide real-world strongholds. Without a palpable sense of place, these battlegrounds never give you enough reason to choose this particular mix of gunmetal and grit over any other. Combined with a weak campaign, that makes the new Medal of Honor more of a casualty than a killer in a marketplace already crowded with full-featured crowd-pleasers.
Sparks fly and scenery disintegrates under the rat-a-tat of heavy fire.PUBLISHER: EA • DEVELOPER: Danger Close Games • ESRB: Mature • MULTIPLAYER: 20 on Xbox Live • ACHIEVEMENTS: Fruitful • COST: $60 • RELEASE DATE: October 23, 2012
+ Fireteam partnerships and six classes lend fresh strategy to familiar multiplayer modes; some fun action set-pieces.
– Solo campaign defined by painfully repetitive core combat and a deeply unsatisfying story.
– Multiplayer maps feel cobbled together; clunky customization and progression.
? Why don't fallen online enemies drop their weapons?
