Unlike the macho military shooters that inspired it, Medal of Honor Warfighter wants you to consider the effects of violence on those responsible for it. Such appeals to a player’s humanity are bold but risky moves in a military shooter, where countless corpses of faceless terrorists pile up at your feet.

“ An entire two-minute mission consists of taking a single shot you can’t miss.

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“ This is the first time we’ve seen a Frostbite Engine game failing to function at a basic level.

Warfighter strives for this by giving you a genuine impression of what it’s like to live as a Tier 1 operator, the elite operatives at the center of the modernized Medal of Honor series. It’s clear from the first cutscene all the way to the end credits that developer Danger Close has the utmost respect for the extraordinary skills and bravery of these soldiers. If Medal of Honor extended the same level of respect to its players, Warfighter might have accomplished more than its numerous significant failures and lack of player agency has allowed.The landscape of the first-person shooter is not the same as it once was. The 2010 series reboot was a competent mimicry of what had worked previously, and its sequel continues to ignore innovation. For the entirety of its brief five-hour campaign, Warfighter spotlights one tired design idea after the other. Each linear action sequence boils down to whack-a-mole with firearms: AI enemies mindlessly pop out from the same cover spots or stand out in the open just waiting to die. When they’ve all been killed, your squad kicks down a door, kills a handful of evil terrorists in slow motion, and moves onto the next section of the predictable pattern. Warfighter leaves little room for strategic thinking, too, since it funnels your team down narrow paths by blocking alternative routes with rocks, bushes, or invisible walls.The bare-bones mission design of Warfighter is entirely in service of its mantra, not its players. That is, Medal of Honor’s campaign wants to throw you into situations “ripped from the headlines” – and it’s devastating to whatever story Warfighter fails to tell. The primary objective is buried by disjointed jumps from one character or country to the next – as it has been in Battlefield and Call of Duty as well. It’s hard to keep the dots connected, too, because the timeline follows no discernible order and features flashbacks within flashbacks. The narrative of Warfighter’s core revolves around the dissolution and rebuilding of an operator’s family, but the characters and in-game events compromise pathos. How can anyone empathize with a broken man who spends the next few hours plunging a hatchet into hearts, snapping necks, and generally slaughtering hundreds of other people?There’s a massive disconnect between the story Danger Close wants to to tell and the game it’s made, and both suffer because of each other. All of this leaves Warfighter as uninteresting as it is disengaged, and none of its promises pay off.This is equally true in the hollow multiplayer. Abysmal map design cripples the already uninspired objective-based modes, creating obstacles cutting off paths to a bomb site or a flag return point. Shrubbery and impassable rubble obscure routes, creating a dense clutter even in the biggest maps, while spawn camping is an intensely frustrating problem in nearly all modes.Even Warfighter’s class system is outdone by better multiplayer games. Each specialty has its own unique skills, such as the heavy’s armor boost or the scout’s ability to see through walls, but the customization of those characters is limited to their weapons. Streak bonuses unlock as you score points, giving you the choice between aggressive/defensive tactical devices, such as chopper support or smokescreens. The constant calling of support items adds an unpredictable flair to each match, but the moment-to-moment gunplay simply isn’t on the same level of the campaign. That brief moment of tremendous satisfaction when you score a headshot flat-out does not exist online. The lower lethality of weapons on the adversarial side contradicts the “authenticity” EA and Danger Close have been so vocal about – lethal shots to your foes’ heads and hearts often don’t drop them dead, utterly ruining the pace of an already wounded multiplayer experience.Medal of Honor Warfighter’s core design is deeply problematic, and technical issues only cut into it deeper. In both the campaign and online modes, character models vanish from existence, sound drops in and out, the frame rate tanks, and textures sometimes look washed-out and low-res on consoles, even after applying a 2GB HD update in the Xbox 360 version. This is the first time we’ve seen a Frostbite Engine game failing to function at a basic level, and it’s a real shame.