Medal of Honor Multiplayer Preview: Call of the Beard

Medal of Honor does little to hide its inspirations. At a glance, the game is Modern Warfare, another attempt at military realism disrupted by an ever-running tally of experience points and the ability to respawn. It’s only when you start playing the game that Medal of Honor distinguishes itself as something different from Call of Duty. Not drastically different, mind you, but enough to make me understand why you might favor one game over the other.

I previewed Medal of Honor’s multiplayer on Xbox 360 for about two hours at Electronic Arts’ Los Angeles studio last month. Together with writers from other Web sites, we played straightforward team deathmatch in the ruins of Kabul City and an objective-based game in a valley of Afghanistan, where the offensive team had to advance along a series of control points. These are the same maps and modes that will be available in Medal of Honor’s multiplayer beta, which opens to Battlefield: Bad Company 2 owners on June 17, and on June 21 to people who pre-order Medal of Honor.

You’d be forgiven for thinking Medal of Honor and Call of Duty share some DNA (actually, they do), especially when you see those familiar point totals popping over your fallen foes’ bodies, the mark of extra score earned from a headshot or revenge kill. The use of high-tech florescent fonts and dramatic action movie music doesn’t help. Add attachable weapon enhancements and special abilities such as recon and air strikes, and you might say MOH is a straight-up COD clone, but it’s not that simple.

The differences come down to a few little factors, cumulating into what seems like a slower-paced game than Modern Warfare. It could have something to with the framerate, which hovers around 30 frames per second in the multiplayer component. Superficial as that seems, I think a key part of the Modern Warfare experience is the way it glides. When video games get into the 60 frames per second range, they take on an almost unnatural feel, for better or worse. Medal of Honor, by comparison, doesn’t feel sluggish, but it doesn’t feel like your avatar’s been dipped in lubricant, either.

More importantly, Medal of Honor is slightly more forgiving than its Activision-bred competitor. This is hard to quantify, and could owe to everyone’s lack of experience, but death wasn’t a foregone conclusion when an enemy spotted me first. It’s not Halo in terms of bullet absorption, but there seemed to be just a little bit of wiggle room for escaping close calls. We were told that developer DICE paid close attention to detecting bullet collisions accurately, so it may be that your opponents are a bit tricky to shoot in Medal of Honor.

There are more tangible distinctions as well. Players can change every detail of their weapons loadout mid-match, resulting in more control over your strategy. Games top out at 24 players to Modern Warfare 2′s 18, potentially demanding a greater emphasis on teamwork.  All of these things result in a game that doesn’t fall firmly into the arcade shooter category, but isn’t highly tactical, either.

Of course, the way Medal of Honor felt as I played it could change between now and its October 12 release date. You may be more interested in the concrete details, like how your characters has two leveling systems — one that’s pure experience grinding and one that’s skill-based — or how the game features unlockable beards as a reward for extended play. The other folks at the preview event were certainly interested in the nitty gritty, asking whether there’s proximity chat (no), dedicated servers (no only for rent through trusted partners), gibbing (no) and a beard equivalent for the insurgent side (yes). I’m more concerned with what it’s like to play the game, and after my two-hour session I’m convinced that Medal of Honor feels like its own entity, even if it shamelessly rips design and aesthetic choices from its competition.

Does that mean Medal of Honor will be worth buying? While the answer for you depends on how much military shooter you can tolerate, there’s still more we need to know. EA hasn’t revealed every multiplayer mode, and maybe one of the undisclosed modes is a game-changer. And then there’s the single player campaign to consider (I haven’t tried it). But if you haven’t tired of the whole realistic-but-not-really army simulation genre, Medal of Honor deserves some pre-launch mindshare.