Okay, this post is probably gonna be a little bit shorter than previous posts, but I really wanted to get another one out there before the month was out. If I wasn’t lazy, or if I was a little more pragmatic, this wouldn’t be an issue, but what can you do?

So. Medal of Honor: Warfighter. Perhaps the most generic name you could possibly give to what, from the campaign side, appears to be the most generic, by-the-numbers shooter to come out recently. Unless of course the official Medal of Honor Twitter account is to be believed, as their retweets will tell you that this is the best game ever made, ever. Personally, I haven’t touched the campaign, partially because I’ve not played through the previous game (which, is actually pretty decent, I’ve heard), but mostly because I have the game on PC and I’d rather not force myself through a generic linear shooter if I don’t even get some good Gamerscore out of it. So I’ve only played multiplayer, and that’s all I’m going to talk about.

It’s alright. It’s not great, but it’s not offensively bad either. It’s competent. It takes the tropes you’d expect from these types of shooters, but doesn’t do anything new with them. It’s so tragically obvious that this game is just here as filler because EA didn’t have a Battlefield game to put out this year.

The multiplayer is set up similar to Battlefield, in that you have a number of different classes (or “Operators”) to choose from when going into battle. However, where in Battlefield those classes have distinctive roles and playstyles, the only fundamental difference between them in this game is the type of gun you use. If you want to use an assault rifle, you pick the Assaulter, if you want to use an SMG, you pick the Spec Ops class, a sniper rifle, the Sniper, and so on. Each class is also locked to certain types of grenades and their killstreaks, but other than the Spec Ops’ Signal Scan ability, which lets you very briefly see where enemies are through the map, none of the differences really make each class feel particularly different from the last. I would much rather they just remove this unnecessary extra step and just let me pick a gun and go. I just wanna shoot dudes.

And shoot dudes is mostly what you do. There are a couple of objective games, like your capture-and-hold equivalent, a mode similar to Battlefield’s Rush, and so on. But that maps aren’t particularly great and in some cases feel like they weren’t even designed with objective games modes in mind, so I mostly just stick to team deathmatch.

There are a baffling number of customisation options for your gun, which is cool, I guess. As I mentioned, each Operator can only use one type of gun, and you unlock more guns for that class by unlocking other nationalities for that class. Yeah. Why you don’t just unlock the gun is beyond me. You can customise each aspect of your gun, from the sight, barrel, stock, right down the the paint job, all done in a section rather perversely named “My Gun”. Problem is, all the guns just feel sort of the same. Hell, two of the completely separate choices of gun for the Spec Ops class are just two MP7s. The same fucking gun. The only difference is that one has a weird circular sight on it, and the other has a more normal looking red dot sight. All these guns, with all these different options, all these Operators with all these nationalities, yet it all just blurs together into one big, generic mesh.

And that’s pretty much all there is to it. It’s just a completely by-the-numbers game, with zero personality and nothing to call its own. Here to fill two weeks before Halo 4 and Black Ops II drop. Two games which actually look pretty fucking good and that I’m really looking forward to. So expect some more positive posts about those games sometime in the future. Maybe.