Medal of Honor: Vanguard [Wii]

"So after playing a bit of Red Steel and failing miserably at it (and thus giving the game a bad review) I wasn’t very anxious to play Medal of Honor: Vanguard. It seemed pointless as I wasn’t very good at pointing the Wii-mote and moving around with it. Still, I wanted to play in this draught period of the year when it comes to games, so I put it in my Wii and started.

To prepare and get in the mood I watched some WWII movies, and I’m not sure if it helped, but I quite enjoyed playing. Aiming and moving around was going better and better for me. I didn’t like the graphics, but I wasn’t expecting anything great from my Nintendo console. Each time you need to do a new move with your nunchuck and Wii-mote you get a small tutorial which you have to complete in order to use the move.

Starting with jumping out of a plane with a parachute, you’re only airborne for about 12 seconds (probably much less). You have no idea what to look for and just land somewhere (even though you’ve just learned how to steer your chute). You’ve just jumped right into the action. I liked that and I started shooting around. You quickly learn how to duck, get on the ground and jump. Also taking better aims is part of the tutorial here. The controls are very easy to understand.

Easy to understand, but not easy to do at certain times. Throughout the game I think my controls have failed me 100s of times! The developers simply tried to map way too many controls to the nunchuck: kneeling, standing, jumping, throwing grenades, reloading, turning around quickly. Luckily you can also use the buttons on the nunchuck for some of these actions (kneeling/standing up). But I’ve turned myself around facing a wall when all I wanted to do was reload my rifle more than once, and that sucks. It doesn’t ruin the game at all, but it sucks.

When you complete your first mission (fairly quick if I say so myself), you select the second mission. This is when you realize this is going to be a very short game with only 4 missions. I figured the next 3 missions should be a bit longer, or that maybe after the 4 missions I would enter a 2nd chapter or something (btw, I was wrong).

Playing the second and third mission (realizing after the third that you actually get points if you parachute to the area with all the coloured smoke coming from it), you start noticing that this games leveldesign isn’t very interesting at all. It’s boring! You jump out of a plane, run around shooting Germans and Italians, take out Anti-Air guns, clear a house and then defend that place from the Nazis until back-up arrives. All 4 missions are very much like this.

Also, you’re able to complete all missions in 45 minutes or so, which means that you can complete this game very very fast. It’s simply not worth the money. Although I think throwing grenades with the nunchuck-controller is the coolest thing like –ever- :P the faults of this game simply don’t make up for it. I had fun playing, but after an hour it became a drag for me to complete, only playing so that I could shelve it on my ‘completed’ stack.

I’ve been playing COD3 when I finished MOH:V, and it’s the only other WWII game out there, so I simply had to compare. This game isn’t worth your hard-earned cash – especially not compared to COD3. You could rent it out sometime though, you can easily complete it in 1 or 2 days. The game has some potential, but they didn’t work it out. The controls are bad, the missions are the same, it is short, it is bad. I’m sending it away with a 3. "