“Revive used” – Medal of Honor: European Assault

**Medal of Honor: European Assault** (EA, PlayStation 2, 2005)

Medal of Honor: Rising Sun didn’t just manage to disgust the likes of me with its approach to telling history. It also got widely dismissed by fans of Medal of Honor and first person shooters more generally as being an inept and overextended retread of the gameplay of breakthrough title Medal of Honor: Frontline. The obvious possible next moves for EA were to go completely back-to-basics or to try something more different; European Assault does a bit of both.

It goes back to Europe (embedding an American player character into the British army in situations where there were no Americans in reality) and to familiar story beats, but treats the gameplay a bit differently. There is a concerted effort to get further away from obvious corridors, with wider levels, multiple routes and different secondary objectives that show up as a result of exploration. Go near an anti-aircraft gun and you may be asked to take it down. The game also adds rudimentary squad mechanics that give some of the flavour of Conflict games with as little effort from developer or player as possible. Likewise taking after Conflict, giving you an inventory of medipacks that you can use at any time on yourself or your comrades is a much better experience, as is much of the game’s flashier gameplay. And it’s not any less realistic than the previous instant healing.

What is less realistic is that any new medipacks you encounter to collect have whacking great glowing green cross symbols rotating in the air above them. Equivalents are there for guns, ammo, grenades and smaller health boosts too. And ‘revives’, i.e. extra lives. Alongside that is a compass which shows where to go very clearly, and a simplification to carrying two guns at a time which is part of taking after Halo as much as its predecessors or Call of Duty rivals. All of the bold on-screen guidance is a tonal switch-up, as are the (generally optional) boss fights added to every level: enemy officers with powerful weapons, tough skins, and health-meters above their heads.

Frontline had a boss fight at its end, too. And there were plenty of video game contrivances in previous entries. But European Assault turns them into unmissable glowing symbols, figuratively and literally, even as it couples them with more transparent plays at solemnity than ever. Rising Sun gave you testimony from real veterans as a bonus feature, separated out somewhat from game elements. European Assault’s campaign is introduced with aged voices looking back on the war, the series’s always-sentimental music meeting its audio match. The resulting clash with the newly slick, all-action gameplay is bizarre, if I’m feeling generous, and sickening if not.

And it didn’t work. European Assault was less successful than the previous couple of games, and the series would not go on to turn things back around. Part of this is attributable to the surprising decision not to include online multiplayer, which in this genre at least already made it look hopelessly behind the times. It would be nice to think that it was because its combination of jingoistic sentimentality and fantasy gameplay was a turn-off for players more widely too.

Really, though, I think it’s more that its setting had already been exhausted and no number of gameplay tweaks could make it fresh again. There is no awe-inspiring set piece to rival Omaha Beach or Pearl Harbour from the previous two games because they’d already done those. There doesn’t feel like much reason for European Assault to even be set in World War II other than clinging to the notion that that was what a Medal of Honor game was defined by. Others would soon realise the benefits of breaking out of those constraints.