There's a strong case to be made Warfighter will bring enough new features to the table to earn your hard-earned bucks.

You must choose. But choose wisely.

Fire Teams should add a level of team play, tactics, and strategy that's notably absent from CoD.

This time around, the MoH design team is all in the same boat.

My chief concern is whether or not Danger Close can handle small to mid-sized multiplayer map design.

It's not the epic Battlefield 3 versus Modern Warfare 3 clash we saw last fall, but two big modern/near-future military shooters will unload their clips on one another over your $60 come autumn. Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 and Medal of Honor: Warfighter have much in common, but the discerning military-shooter fan will have some legitimate options. My mission (which I chose to accept before the file could self-destruct): dig into the details to help you decide which game to bet on as the best shooter this holiday season. Treyarch hasn't shown off the multiplayer modes, but Black Ops 2 will be the sixth Call of Duty installment Activision has churned out since the stellar Modern Warfare in 2007. Treyarch says it has a few surprises up its sleeve (even though they said the innovative and potentially-interesting Strike-Force missions will be single-player only), but let's be honest: at the end of the day we all know exactly what we'll be getting into. CoD isn't about to change up its cash-cow formula too much anytime soon. Warfighter? It's got a lot to prove, and there's a strong case to be made that it will bring enough new features to the table to earn your hard-earned bucks. Here's why:In Warfighter, you'll be able to play as soldiers from 10 different nations (US, Poland, UK, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Australia, Germany, Korea, and Russia) and their respective special ops teams. The US gets three (SEAL, SFOD-D, and OGA) because we're awesome. On the surface, it's not much of an addition. After all, we've been able to play as American, British, Russian, German, the infamous and ambiguous OpFor, and more in CoD for years.What makes Warfighter's nations unique is the fact you'll be able towhich you'll play as rather than being assigned one based on the map, and the 12 spec ops teams each have their own unique look and authentic equipment that will help lend to different play styles. Danger Close aims to create a FIFA-like sense of home-country pride with players, and I think it will definitely succeed in doing that. Personally, I'm less interested in patriotism and more interested in seeing which spec ops force best fits my visual preferences and mid-range gameplay style.If there's one surefire way to increase your odds of survival in a competitive shooter, it's to pair up with another player. The buddy system instantly doubles your damage output, has someone watching your back, and gives your lone-wolf opponents two targets to shoot at instead of just one. When you're without an actual friend online, that can be easier said than done -- but Warfighter fixes that with its two-man Fire Teams.Think of it as a slimmed-down version of Battlefield's Squad mechanic. Drop into an online battle and you'll be able to quickly pair with a Fire Team partner. Like in Battlefield you'll be able to spawn on your living partner anywhere on the map if you're gunned down, which is nice, but Warfighter takes it a step further, making it easy to know exactly where you partner is at all times by highlighting him (like in Left 4 Dead). Even if you and your partner decide to branch off in two different directions, you'll be able to spot one another and quickly get back together because the outline is visible through buildings and other obstructions. Overall, Fire Teams should add a level of team play, tactics, and strategy that's notably absent from CoD.Treyarch has done a fine job tweaking and enhancing Infinity Ward's old proprietary gameplay engine (which itself is a modified id Tech 3 engine), but there's no getting around the fact that DICE's Frostbite 2 is the ICBM to IW 5.0's RPG. Black Ops 2 looks good. Warfighter looks frickin' amazing. Danger Close says it has taken the visuals to an even higher level than Battlefield 3, and while I'm not so sure about that, there's certainly nothing wrong with only lookingas BF3. Perhaps most impressive is the level of environmental destruction that Frostbite 2 brings, with just about everything a bullet hits splintering, crumbling, or exploding. Even if you're an old-school, dedicated CoD fanatic, there's no getting around this one: Warfighter is vastly superior to Black Ops 2 in terms of graphics.For the 2010 Medal of Honor reboot, Electronic Arts handed the multiplayer reigns to DICE. DICE even used its original Frostbite engine while Danger Close handled the campaign with Unreal Engine 3. The result was two very different games on one disc: a fun (but too-brief) campaign featuring nifty slide-into-cover-and-lean mechanics, and a multiplayer mode that looks and plays like Battlefield without the massive maps or vehicles. In other words: Call of Duty, just not as good. (Kinda like Battlefield 3: Close Quarters.)That was not a good idea. For Warfighter, Danger Close is at the helm of both the campaign and the multiplayer, and it has already stated it will bring the gameplay mechanics it used to create the single-player MoH reboot to Warfighter's multiplayer. Yes, there will be sliding into cover and leaning and peaking -- both big pluses in my book. Especially leaning, which was once a staple of Medal of Honor multiplayer.My chief concern is whether or not Danger Close can handle small to mid-sized multiplayer map design. DICE dove head first into spawn-camping pitfalls with MoH and again with Close Quarters, so hopefully Danger Close will learn from those mistakes. If so, Medal of Honor: Warfighter's multiplayer could very well top the next serving of CoD Treyarch is preparing with Black Ops 2. Certainly not in popularity or sales numbers (Black Ops 2 has already pre-sold more than Warfighter could ever hope to) but in innovation and fresh shooting fun.My recommendation for Danger Close: bring back a remastered version of the Omaha Beach multiplayer map from Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. Do that and I'm sold. Otherwise, it's a flip of the coin for me. Which modern military shooter will you be investing in come autumn?