Medal of Honor: No Call of Duty, critics say

EA’s storied franchise Medal of Honor is a familiar name to old-school shooter fans, but in recent years it’s taken a backseat to the massive success of Activision’s Call of Duty games. This week, however, it storms back into action for the first time in three years -- and it’s facing hot competition from the next Call of Duty game, Black Ops, due in about a month.

Though Medal of Honor is releasing today, it’s been making headlines for several months. EA’s decision to allow gamers to play as the Taliban in multiplayer matches proved a lightning rod for controversy. Ultimately, the game found itself banned from sale on US military bases, and facing harsh criticism from the British government.

But the Taliban are gone -- or, to be more precise, they were renamed “Opposing Force” in a widely criticized decision. So now that that's settled, does Medal of Honor achieve its goals of producing a tribute to American special forces troops, or is it a poor second to the all-conquering Call of Duty series?

Broadly, the consensus is the latter. As of the time of writing, review aggregation site Metacritic puts the game’s various versions around the 75% mark, a very far cry from last year’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which wound up averaging in the mid-90s. Combine that with a couple of standout low marks from respected outlets Giant Bomb and IGN -- both of whom give it a disappointing 6/10 -- and it’s clear EA has wound up off-target.

“Medal of Honor is one of the bigger disappointments of 2010,” says IGN. With “cliched shooting-gallery levels,” “no real investment” in characters, and an interface that “seems to deliberately lead you in the wrong direction,” says Arthur Gies, “Medal of Honor walks into a quagmire it never really escapes from.”Yahoo games