 "Great Game, Good Graphics" | 2009-05-13 |
| - Reviewed By User: A2GMJ806KCUPD |
| This game is great. I play at Very High detail and High on that other question. The graphics are good, the game has good mission builds, great weapon sounds (especially the Thompson) and some-what good AIs. If you have the graphics to support the game, the game is great. Most people just don't like the game because their computers can't run it. My advice is to buy this game. You will get enjoyment out of it. Also, make sure you have everything the game needs and maybe more so you can play on higher texture and detail. |
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 "Improvements in Game Play, but Single Player Campaign is a letdown" | 2009-05-09 |
| - Reviewed By hobbs_tx |
Medal of Honor Pacific Assault(MOHPA) leaves me with mixed feelings. I have played Medal of Honor Allied Assault Deluxe (MOHAA), Call of Duty: Game of the Year Edition (COD), and Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 (BIA).
Positives: Graphics are top notch and realistic. MOHPA improves all of the areas that were lacking in MOHAA. You can pick up any type of weapon in the game including the enemy's, Japanese ammunition only works in the Japanese weapons, you have full range of movement (crouch and prone), ability to use aim with any weapon. The teammate AI is greatly improved over MOHAA. Your teammates are useful and necessary part of the game to complete tough missions. There was added feature where one of your teammates is a corpsman and can heal you and your teammates. The enemy AI is also much improved on higher difficulty levels. They use team assault techniques and effective flanking tactics. Basically, MOHPA brings all of the game play features that COD brought to the table.
Weaknesses: The main reason I gave this game lower marks is the campaign missions. I really did not like a lot of them. The Pearl Harbor scenarios were a drag and boring. It would have been better to just show a movie for Pearl Harbor scenario. The flying mission was irritating. If I wanted a flight simulator, I would buy one. The controls were horrible and unrealistic and I also could not destroy the Japanese carrier after hitting it with 4 bombs and a torpedo. Most of the rest of the missions were jungle patrols and capture the huts. These missions reminded me more of Vietnam than WWII. The real complaint with these missions was that the play field was so limited that you could not use flanking. Most of vehicle missions seems poorly setup. It really didn't matter if you did anything in several of the missions; they still had the same outcome.
While the teammate AI was improved, the teammate controls were limited. BIA has vastly better teammate controls which allows you to move them in certain directions and put fire on specific targets. Also while I liked the corpsman feature, basically he would heal your teammates indefinitely. Your teammates cannot die and he can even heal himself from deaths door. Very unrealistic. Basically they used this to offset the overwhelming odds you were usually fighting in.
Summary: If you have waited this long to buy the game your computer should be able to handle the hearty system requirements. MOHPA gets A+ for graphics realism, but falls short of realistic campaign missions. Loading times are also extremely long even for high powered modern machines. If you really want to experience the Pacific theatre of WWII, you may want to get this game. Otherwise, you likely won't find much enjoyment here.
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 "Awesome game!" | 2008-12-12 |
| - Reviewed By User: A11OJYPVKBWZBJ |
| Awseome game great action and one of my favorites. The squad action is great, game play is good, missions are excellent. Probably the coolest thing about this game is the interaction with your squad and the realism that involves pacific warfare. Only drawback is the first island mission for some reason it bogs down and feels kinda like slow motion. I think it might just have been my computer cause i had some trouble installing it. Other than that great game! |
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| "Great Game...Great Tribute" | 2008-08-27 |
| - Reviewed By nixon37 |
| I am not the biggest game video player but enjoy them now and then. Having said that, I absolutely love this game. I bought the regular version and then the Director's Edition. The Director's Edition has some great extras, to include a detailed interactive time-line, a video of the Marine Silent Drill Team, and interviews with some USMC veterans, which drew emotion from me at the end of the interviews. The game was historically accurate and even contained the Marine Raider assault on Makin, which is not that widely known about. (Read the book "Carlson's Raid" for a great book on that subject.) This game was not only engaging, but was a tribute to the WW II Marine. God bless them all. |
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| "A good experience with a nod toward realism...." | 2008-05-21 |
| - Reviewed By thomasj77 |
Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault is the type of game that I've been waiting for play for a long time. It seems that all WWII first person shooters were always staged in Europe and none covered the Pacific theatre. In my opinion, this game covers that extremely well. This game is very different, however, from the standard WWII shooters that most of us are used to in Call of Duty and the others in the MoH series. And while I feel that these changes are definitely welcome and make for a great and interesting experience, I'm glad that the other games haven't adopted them.
Pros:
- This game attempts to create a much more realistic type of game play than other WWII shooters. One way it does this is that it seems to take into account weapon ease of use and weight. Reloading some weapons and pulling them up to your shoulder to aim seems to be a bit slower for some than others. An example is the BAR. I found that while this weapon is extremely powerful at long and short range and can kill the enemy in one well placed shot, it took longer to reload or even pull up to your shoulder to aim down the site. This is presumably because this particular weapon is much larger than a standard automatic rifle such as the Thompson. I think changes like this make the game play much more interesting and make you actually think about which weapons you actually choose to use. It causes you take into consideration ease of use as well as deadly efficiency. In CoD, the BAR was almost always my first choice, but not so here. It depended on the situation. I like that.
Another aspect of attempted realism is the introduction of the medic rather than relying on med packs. While the med packs have not been completed abolished, you rely most heavily on your medic. When you're hurt, you back away from the engagement and call him over to patch you up, or in the more difficult stages, you can actually bandage yourself up in order to stop the "bleeding" and allow your medic a chance to come over and heal you up. I think it was a nice touch.
- The camaraderie of your squad that the game attempts to create is also pretty interesting, although I have to say that after finishing the game, the only name I remember in my squad was the name of my medic...go figure ;o). The squad mentality is really pretty cool here. This feature allows you to command your squad to pull back, advance, lay down cover fire, or assemble. It definitely added to the quality of the game to be able to command your squad to lay down covering fire while you dart from behind a safe rock in order to gain a better position on the enemy.
- The AI is really pretty impressive as well. When the enemy begins to lose a firefight, they charge. They hide behind trees, rocks, and other objects. They even do strafing runs while darting from one cover to the other.
- The graphics are top notch and the jungle scenes are equally impressive. Environmental effects, such as sunlight, mist, fog, smoke and explosions are all great.
- The music is excellent. This is especially apparent during some of the jungle scenes. It does a good job of helping to create the mood and take in the environment.
- Voice over's were excellent.
Cons:
- Load times are very long. Much longer than any other game that I've played, although, in my opinion, they did not really detract from the overall enjoyment of the game.
- Quite often you'll have an enemy in your site, and very visible, though it seems that you can never hit them. An example is that you can clearly see their head over a barrel, or clearly see them hiding behind a beam and you've got them zeroed in, but you can't hit them. You have to move a bit more or change spots before the game allows you to score a hit. This became a bit frustrating, but again didn't really detract from the overall enjoyment of the game.
- The one thing that became far more frustrating than the above cons, was the behavior of your squad toward the end of the game. When trying to navigate through tight quarters, which is pretty much what you're doing for the last stages of the game, you often get stuck behind your squad mates. Or you may have found a good spot and are laying it on the enemy when suddenly your guy's jump right in front you. It seems to become a struggle for positioning in this part of the game. There were countless times where I got stuck behind someone, couldn't get to an objective, or got cut down by a machine gun nest because one of my guy's was blocking my path and there's no way to get him to move. At one point I got so frustrated I unloaded a clip into one guy and started butting him with my rifle just to get him out of my way so I could get out of the line of fire of a bunker. I suppose this could be part of the realism being that positioning may have been a bit of a problem in tight quarters in live combat, but I'm hard pressed to believe that anyone is stupid enough to jump in front of a firing gun or to simply stand there when you're trying to get by.
- Some of the sound effects for some of the weapons didn't quite cut it for me.
Gray areas (not so pros and not so cons)
- The end stages definitely became much more difficult, where you seem to be far easier to hit than in the beginning stages. However, I never really got the impression or feeling that the game was "cheating" as I sometimes do with others. It actually provided a bit more of the realism that it was striving for. In my opinion, it just embodied the desperation that the Japanese experienced during these intense battles. In fact, there were a few spots where it was imperative that I utilize my squad for cover fire, and to advance ahead of me in order to allow me to gain the best position on a machine gun nest so that I could take it out. Squad tactics actually became an integral part of the game rather than simply an added feature.
- At one point, you get to fly an American plane and take on some Japanese zeroes and some other naval units. While I think this stage was actually a good idea, it was only partially enjoyable. The controls definitely need far more work. Maneuvering the plane with your mouse is extremely difficult. Luckily, the creators made this level relatively easy. It seems more like something the makers of the game simply wanted you to experience as part of the overall Pacific theatre rather than providing excellent game play.
- At some points of the game, you were given a clear objective, but seemingly not a very clear description or idea of how to complete it. Often times I had to quick save and reload quite a few times in order to "trial and error" it. But in the end, I found that my objective check list simply had the overall objective listed. Your squad mates were the ones you had to listen to to determine the best course of action in order to obtain that objective. Because the battles would get so intense, I would shut them out and not listen. After a lot of reloads I found that my guy's were giving me the clues all along.
I think this game is definitely one to try out. The features it offers are different from most first person shooters though, so be sure to understand that fact before you go into it. I think understanding the goals of the game before you play it is essential to enjoying it. Personally, I think it was a nice break from the normal routine.
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| "Rising Sun 2.0" | 2008-02-11 |
| - Reviewed By wijoco |
The subject matter of EA's disastrous Medal of Honor: Rising Sun on the consoles deserved better treatment. The Pacific Theater of WWII is very much underrepresented in action gaming, at least relative to its european brethren. Fortunately EA decided to give it another whirl with Pacific Assault, and this time made an honest effort.
As other reviewers have mentioned, Pacific Assault requires a good deal more computing power than the box indicates. But if you have a relatively current video card, the game sparkles as one of the most visually stunning WWII first person shooters to date. Nothing in this game looks bad, in fact I felt mesmerized by the world of a war game for the first time since the original Medal of Honor was released. Lighting, character models, particle and smoke effects, everything comes together to create a near reality not seen before in a MOH game. And the jungle missions are utterly stunning. Stalking the lush greenery of the Japanese islands made me understand why my old system chugged so hard trying to render every water ripple, swaying leaf, and startled exotic bird. It's nearly worth the price of admission just to witness the art direction.
Unfortunately...all that beauty comes at the expense of gameplay. While the dense jungle in theory provides cover for stealthy play, in reality it merely hinders achievement. The player's view is blocked by the vegetation, but CPU controlled enemies retain the traditional ability to see through all solid matter. Couple that with the MOH staple of apparently open but actually blocked pathways, and you have a brutal exercise of trial-and-failure gaming. There are occasions where tactical maneuvers pay off enjoyably, but the vast majority of success comes from memorizing enemy locations and behavior right between your last quicksave and untimely death. I consider myself a MOH veteran, but couldn't have finsished the game without jamming on the quicksave feature every 30 seconds (hard difficulty). Don't play it at any difficulty higher than "medium."
Acoustically, Pacific Assault matches its visual grandeur. As expected in this big budget series, sounds effects are utterly realstic with depth and volume in every rifle blast and grenade explosion. The voice work is as good as in any war movie, and the Spielbergian musical score perfectly compliments the action without intruding. In other words, it lives up to our high expectations for Medal of Honor games.
While it was a nice sentiment to include squad-style gameplay, EA may have been better off going with the traditonal Superman-in-trenches method. Not that either is absolutely superior, but the AI of your squadmates is so awful that it nearly wrecks the game. Forget sneaking up on an enemy post; after the first level you'll be searching the manual for an "STFU" command. Your clods-in-arms routinely plop down in front of you as soon as you've established a position and have the enemy in your sights. The command system is horribly broken: not only do they execute idiotically, they sometimes don't respond at all. You'll end up doing the hard labor yourself as these goofers are generally useless in crunch time.
I shouldn't end on that bad a note, so I'll mention that MOH:PA builds one of the most suspenseful story lines of any WWII shooter I've played. Each level seems critically attached to the previous, as EA largely followed the Pacific Theater timeline (unlike the disjointed feel of some Call of Duty games). This Director's Edition version really adds some interesting content. While people just looking to play the game won't care, WWII buffs will appreciate the maps and analysis of various battles, interactive musical scores, and the wartime propaganda speeches by Roosevelt, Churchill, and even Hirohito. Come on, how often do you get to hear an entire Churchill speech actually read *by Churchill*? |
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