Medal of Honor: Frontline

Medal of Honor: Frontline is a first-person shooter and the fourth game in the popular Medal of Honor series. The game was released on Playstation 2, Xbox and Gamecube in 2002.

In the game you control a character named Jimmy Patterson, a Lieutenant from the 2nd Ranger Battalion, who is working for the OSS (The Office of Strategic Services, predecessor of the CIA, formed during WWII), as he campaigns his way across Europe into Nazi Germany itself, during World War II. The campaign consists of six chapters, and each chapter has two, three or four missions. Two chapters take place in France, two in Holland and two in Nazi Germany. Lt. Jimmy Patterson's mission is to capture a prototype of the Horten Ho 229. The Ho IX, as it was called, was the first application of a flying wing design, combined with a jet engine. Baron Von Strumgeist is the commander of the facility in charge of designing the HO IX, and several other informants and soldiers are involved with various missions.

In the game you can find various weapons, such as the M1 Garand, the German STG44, a Walther P38 or the Springfield sniper rifle. Other objects that you can find are health cans (heals 10% of your health), kits (heals 25% of your health) and packs (heals 50% of your health) and of course the mission objectives such as rosters, keys and other stuff.

In each of the missions you can get a bronze, silver or gold medal. Bronze can be achieved by completing the level, while silver is a little bit harder to get, you need to kill 95% of the enemies. Especially this goal can be hard sometimes, because some enemies won't spawn before you go back to an area you've already visited or in some other cases you need to mount a MG44 before they'll spawn. For gold you need 75% of your health at the end of the level + 95% of the enemies killed. When you get all gold medals in one chapter, you'll receive a reward.

You can notice that the creators have put much effort in this game, as you can see in various bonus video's that you can acquire by completing the missions. This game has very good graphics and animations for its time. Unfortunately I'm not able to make a good quality video myself because I own the PS2 version. There are a few things that are great about this game. First thing that is great is the music. In some occasions it can be really sad, especially in the mission Arnhem Knights. The music in this mission is so sad that it gives me the shivers while playing the game. In this mission you have to fight in the ruins of Arnhem alongside some British soldiers, which brings me to the second thing that jumps out. Nowadays there are many games that feature AI squad mates (let's take the Call of Duty series as example) and when they get killed they will be replaced by new guys, so you don't care about it when one gets killed. In this game they won't be replaced, and they don't respawn. When one gets killed you can actually feel sad, especially in combination with the sad music in Arnhem Knights.

In conclusion, I really think this is one of the best World War II games ever, it has great animations and graphics for its time, and I think I really need to give Michael Giacchino (who is the music composer) credit for the greatness of this game. If you can find this game somewhere you must buy it, I guarantee you won't be disappointed about it.