Customer Reviews

Medal of Honor: Allied Assault Breakthrough Expansion Pack

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I absolutely love the MOH series and this expansion pack, but I have to be honest and say short, pricey games like this are why software piracy is so prevalent! I was finished this expansion pack in 6 hours. Just when it was getting good!!! Shame on you EA!
Ok...BreakThrough will have you working hard to win. You jump from vehicles to fight then back into the vehicles to cruise again. AWESOME! I love the new and interesting missions. Game play is faster and more intense. Guess what, no picking up your dead enemies weapons(not sure if this is a glitch or not) this time so use your ammo carefully!

The BUGS - Your buddies can get in the way at times and are very poor shots when you need them the most. I got mad at MOH:AA and Spearhead because you could be right over a wounded soldier shooting him and it would have no effect, he would just stand back up and shoot at you. You get the same deal here! I wish EA would resolve that! Dead soldiers still disappear halfway into the ground or walls too :-(

Overall, this is a great expansion pack so don't miss out on it - BUT - I think this is too expensive for what you get. I say wait until this package hits the $20 mark. Anything higher is just ripping yourself off. EA has made a lot of money of the MOH franchise, they could kick back a low price by now.

Medal of Honor: Allied Assault Breakthrough is a good expansion pack. It requires Allied Assault to run.

Breakthrough is a really good game, but not up to the quality of the first Allied Assault. The game fails to offer anything as exciting as the Omaha Beach scene from Allied Assault, but it is more interesting than Spearhead. It picks up where Spearhead (the first MOH expansion pack) left off. You being in a scene with lots of tanks, and the feeling of war is portrayed really well.

Graphically, the game is a little dated. There are only minor graphical improvments. The sound effects and excellent, and the music is good. Online play is fun, and the maps are designed well.

Overall, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault Breakthrough is worth playing. It may not be the best FPS around, but it portrays WWII like no other game.

This is an enjoyable expansion, but no more. It plays a lot like the original Medal of Honor, which is a very good thing. For some reason, MoH always has been the first person shooter I enjoyed more than all the others. I am not sure why, but things just seem right. One just has this feeling of "being there" (which is often pretty scary!), rather than the feeling that you are playing a game. Within limits of course.

So I am happy about the gameplay. Of course one has to realize that MoH now is a pretty old game, and as with all expansions, one should not expect a massive technology upgrade. I am sure, this will happen with the next MoH, but it certainly hasn't happened here.

Also, this game seems to be lacking some of those big, impressive moments that the original game and also (to some extent) spearhead had. This expansion tries to create these great, scripted events and it succeeds better than most other games, but certainly not as well as the previous MoH games.

The AI could be smarter, but I haven't noticed any real bad issues like some of the other reviewers seem to have encountered. Once again, things seem to be at the level they were at the original game, which was impressive then, and isn't quite as impressive now.

Time-wise, it is a bit short. I played through it in a (long) evening. That doesn't bother me too much though. It was an evening of fun, I lived through some tense moments, and I do not have to spend the whole weekend on this... ;-)

I don't really share the opinion of fellow reviewers that this is overly hard. I didn't have too much of a problem playing through this, which may in part be due to the great save-everywhere system. Sometimes there are a lot of enemies, but don't freak out and just go after them one by one. I do agree that the supply of ammo is a bit short. The same is true for first-aid packs. Tip: Try to open doors and check out basements, even if they are not along your main route. Every now and then, it pays of.

I did encounter a crash-bug in the very last mission, that crashed the game to the desktop 3 or 4 times at a similar spot. At that mission, I also encountered some frame-rate issues. Hmmm... that's a bit disappointing. Luckily, this wasn't too much of a problem, once again, thanks to the save-game system. I also noticed that the collision detection is not all that great. Sometimes you shoot into an obstacle that should really not be in the way as far as one can tell visually. I also once or twice saw a machine gun stick through the wall, giving away the position of an enemy. And once a soldier just walked through the wall, although I think he actually came through the door and was just clipped out incorrectly. Anyway: None of these issues were too much of a problem, but one would have expected a bit more polish from EA.

It's basically a variation of Spearhead. There are some interesting weapons that weren't available in the previous MOHAA games. It also has the same annoying visual flaw that Spearhead has: white rectangles tend to appear where the bullets hit. This peculiar problem doesn't exist in the original MOHAA or any other FPS games. The patch that was released for Speahead didn't solve this problem and I don't expect Breakthrough to be any better off. It still has the same design inconsistencies such as starting a new mission without specific weapons that you previously had that would be more useful.

I don't know if it's a bug, but I wish I knew in advance that extra ammo would be harder to come by than in the previous games. Although I was amused by the fact that at one point I had to sneak up and pistol whip three enemies before I could go any further in the Tunisia mission.

One major annoyance about Breakthrough is that hard difficulty is incorrectly named. It should be called INSANE because it's insane that the enemies are able to shoot you dead with TWO shots while you're running AND in the dark or during something like a sandstorm! The disparity of difficulty btween medium and hard is considerable.

The final part of the Italian mission proved to be the most annoying. How is it that I'm able to get into a tank, but can't jump over short walls/obstacles the enemies are behind and shooting me from? Why are they able to WALK over these short walls/obstacles? This proved to be highly problematic in the "defend the fort" situations where you aren't allowed to take the fight to the enemies and are stuck manning a machine gun and/or have to be aware of them liberally being able to get around obstacles and shooting you from behind. This showed the friendly AI to be ludicrously difficient. The very last part where you have to prevent the comm. tower from being blown has a huge flaw: if the Germans had so many Panzershreck rounds to shoot at you, why wouldn't they simply shoot the tower itself with these rounds? Why keep sending one guy after another to attach timed explosives (and in an exposed position)?

I've been an avid Medal of Honor Allied Assault fan since the original. I have played every single mission and beat them with flying colors. The original was the greatest. It had everything from sneaking into a German facility, wearing an SS unform, to the invasion of Omaha Beach. MOHAA was original, yet very realistic.

Spearhead sort of strayed from this when it had you, an American paratrooper with the 101st Airborne Division jump into Normandy and find yourself fighting alongside British soldiers, and then a short time after that in Berlin with the Russians. You had a chance to use the new weapons of these countries, but it seemed too staged to be real.

Breakthrough completely broke through my long-time respect for the Medal of Honor legacy. You did the same old thing you did in Spearhead, but in Italy. Realism took a turn for worse as the developers tried to make you feel surrounded. But, what happens is enemy troops will literally appear out of nowhere. Another problem I found was that they NEVER give you enough ammo...And don't say I waste, because I've never ran into this problem before. Also, not to mention the idiotic mission plots and objectives. The third or so mission requires you to liberate a fully-functional and guarded German POW camp in Italy. Not so bad, eh? It requires you to do so ALL BY YOURSELF. And furthermore, by the time I reached it, I had no ammo left. This wasn't any fluke, either. It's happened to me many times in Breakthrough.

I think the best advice I can give to you is, "Don't waste your money." This is not the Medal of Honor you know and love. It is an attempt to prolong the Medal of Honor series that, as you know, is fading away. This is just the same old stuff, folks... Nothing new.

Many people weren't expecting much from this new expansion pack, especially after Spearhead. But not this badly. The MoH franchise has always been loved and cherished by many FPS Gamers. Breakthrough just didn't pick up where Spearhead had failed.
Pros:
Sound - Luscious and wonderul, it leaves most games (Max Payne, Call of Duty, etc..) in the dust for this part.

More Nazis and MoHAA - If you liked any previous MOHAA games, you'll definitely find yourself with more Nazis to MG and more objectives to complete.

Cons:
Graphics - They aren't to bad, but not too good looking either. I think 2015 should of tweaked it a bit more to make it look more realistic.

Gameplay - Breakthrough seriously needs more thought and re-working. The A.I. is horrible (Germans point at your tank with a bazooka and then realize they have forgotten to reload it) Glitches are also very noticeable and are seen constantly as well. (A Nazis is shot and leans over an invisble railing) The physics are as bad as they have always been. Enemies are shot and they're dead bodies just seem to dissappear into a wall or they go through a pole and many other problems.

Multiplayer: The multiplayer is extremely laggy and doesn't deliver much fun. The liberation mode isn't really all that it's cracked up to be as well.

Hopes:
Hopefully, a patch will become available and resolve these problems and the new Pacific Assault game will make up for the last two MoH titles.

I have been a huge fan of Medal of Honor since I bought Allied Assault and even after Spearhead's shortfalls, but this is just terrible. This expansion pack should have been awesome, yet it failed terribly. The missions have potential, but are horrible. The African campaign where you had to defend the braindead minesweeping tanks was sheer agony. You have to stay ahead of the tanks to protect them, but if you take the time you need to kill the Germans who threaten you and the tanks, you'll likely be run over by the tanks you're protecting. It's very difficult to keep an eye on your tanks, keep moving up and shooting every German all at once. After a few minutes, it gets very tiring.

In the Italian campaign, you fire one round, ALL the Italians will know exactly where you are and you'll be surrounded in seconds. Being shot from every angle (where each shot throws off your aim) while using your Garand can be difficult, especially since there will be no health for you until much later. Later on you will have to fight off hordes of Italian tanks with mortars (as if those mortars could scratch a tank.) You're in a house with a small wall around it, you have to use these cumbersome mortars to destroy these tanks from two different directions, and if one touches the wall, you fail your mission. Even if you destroy it a split second after it touches the wall. Even though the enemy is destroyed, the enemy still has broken through.

One very annoying thing is the lack of ammunition. You have to conserve ammo like mad. About one in every 10 soldiers drops some ammo, if you're lucky. In most situations, I had to fight a group of Germans at close range with nothing more than my sniper rifle and pistol (at least the Italian pistol is decent) only to rewarded with no ammunition. It's very frustrating.

The single player mode ended twice as soon as it should have, and I was left with the feeling of "That's it?"

Like Spearhead, the shortfalls in singleplayer were somewhat made up for with improvements in the multiplayer. However the improvements were nothing spectacular. New modes, weapons and maps were nice, when I could play it. Apparently Breakthrough has a problem where when you try to connect to a multiplayer game, it says your CD key is already in use. Natrually I thought someone was using a pirated copy with my CD key. That is, until I went to their website and found out that's not the case at all. Apparently it's some bug where they screwed up and you have to pay. The explanation on how to fix the problem is of epic proportions (you have to delete the game in a special way and re-install it in a special way) and I just felt cheated. They screwed up so you have to compensate to use the product you paid for.

This is only everything I feel like writing about right now that I can remember (I gave up on this expansion months ago.) Just stick with MOHAA or Spearhead if you already have it. If you really want to try this out, don't spend over $10 for it.

EDIT: Since I wrote this review, I re-installed Breakthrough out of curiosity and the multiplayer works fine this time. I don't know how common the problem I mentioned is.

---- Contains minor spoilers ----

I only paid $10 for this expansion pack so I didn't really expect all that much. I'd played Mohaa all the way through without any major problems so I was suprised to find that some portions of this game are ridiculously difficult. I found I kept running out of ammo because the vast majority of bad guys don't drop ammo when you kill them.

Other parts of the game are also poorly designed such as the bit where your buddy is trying to unlock a door. You get swamped by grenade launching dudes and don't stand a chance. There are several other points which are extremely difficult too. There doesn't really seem to be a good reason for designing a game with this level of difficulty. And, yes, I'm playing on 'EASY'.

The standard cheats don't seem to work on this expansion set and I can't find any cheats online which either means there aren't any or no-one cares enough about the game to research them. Either way, the only way around these impossible sections is to jump to the next map.

There are some cool new weapons such as a powerful air-rifle, a wimpy sub machine gun, and an excellent machine gun. You also get to use mortars, ack-ack, and other heavy artillery. There's also a good dose of humor too.

Overall I'd say it might be worth $10 but not a penny more.

This is the buggiest game I've ever purchased, and it does not stand up to EA Games shining (but rapidly fading) history. For example: I've been stuck on a rooftop early in the game covering some guy name Klaus while he picks the lock on a door. Meanwhile, Nazis are coming out of the woodwork. After about the 10th try, he finally opens the door and we go to the bottom of the stairs where . . . nothing happens. The game is stuck. I cannot walk past him, and he just stands there. I go back outside and nothing happens for several minutes. Eventually the Nazis show back up and I run out of ammo. This makes no sense because we supposedly on a covert mission, and we should be running away once through the door.

In addition, the graphics engine is severely showing its age, and overall the gameplay, AI, etc. is way behind.

This game has its moments, but most of the time its more Rambo-style kill everything that moves action. Also, there is very little ammo to be picked up. The game throws a LOT of enemies at you, and several times I've run out of ammo. There may be a pile of corpses at your feet, but you can't get their ammo or weapons. Very frustrating. I am wondering if this is a bug or intentional. At one point I found a cheat code on the net and gave myself ammo that way. The gameplay and graphics are ok if you have enough ammo to survive. There's nothing here however that you can't get out of CALL OF DUTY or the other Allied Assault games. The ammo problem takes away at least one star for me. It literally makes it impossible to play on certain levels.