Customer Reviews

Medal of Honor Pacific Assault: Director's Edition

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I feel for those people who have taken the time to write a review that merely exposes their ignorance of the game. Clearly the game is intended to give you a taste of what it was like to be in World War II in the Pacific. I think that for us older gamers and those younger ones that have the ability to use their own imagination, this game is actually very nice.

The point to remember is that while you may want complete and utter control over the situation, these guys did not have it. Also, don't forget that these guys in the game did not have a "Quick Save" to help them out. I find the AI and environment rather appropriate for what I've read and appreciate their willingness to force players to deal with the same frustrations real combat veterans may have felt. Sometimes you are simply stuck in a difficult situation or environment and have to make due. Often times, people surviving was not about their super skills but simply luck. Realizing that and making it through some of these levels is what brings the game home for me.

All those "blast everything with unlimited ammo and unlimited life" players should choose their standard Halo 2 and move on. You want to deal with a smidgen of the real challenges and frustration a real war veteran may have dealt with...play this game. Be patient, stay focused and enjoy the embience from the safety of your computer screen and this game will return rewards.

Robert

I'm probably one of the few people who has everything needed to run this game well, a 3GHz Athlon 64, 2Gb of fast RAM, GeForce 6800 Ultra 256 and a fast SATA drive on a good Chaintech motherboard. So I did get the intended game experience, no lag, no choppy graphics.

First, when you start the game, you have to endure a few adverts, every time. If the are selling me adverts then they should cut the price. I gave up on this game for a while, after launching into the action you get killed and are forced back to the training level. Very clever guys, very movie like, and totally unnecessary and a real pain in the rear end. I've been playing FPS games since Wolfenstein 3D and I don't need anyone to force me to define a key to crouch or jump or move left and right.

Now, the game play. The Pearle Harbor scene is just a waste of space, sorry but I'm not actually interested in saving random injured guys, I came here to blow away the bad guys. Was this some sort of attempt to make the game more inclusive for people who don't want to blow away bad guys? Well, they aren't going to like 95% of the game then are they.

Up to now this series has been fairly realistic, you got armed like the guys in that theatre. So were there really any American Marines raiding with five shot bolt action rifles? In the whole series the use of heavy weapons has been a distraction, just a way of adding some action I suppose, but it fits about as well as having to fight your way to your aircraft in MS Flight Simulator. The simulation of foot soldiers is almost hand animation standard, the simulation of aircraft is probably ten years out of date. Shooting from vehicles sucks too, not even a formula one car turns as sharply as they do.

Control of the rest of the squad is inadequate, much of the time I want them to stay down and back but regardless of what I say they run on ahead and start a battle I'm not ready for. And then there are no clear criteria for victory. In the scene where you rescued a crashed pilot I tried some strategies that had me killing loads of bad guys and yet there I was being bayonetted. When I completed it successfully it didn't seem like we killed half as many bad guys.

Then there's the long load time, and more especially long reload times. If I quick save with f5 then restore within the same scene with f9 it should just take a second or so to put me back where I was, instead it seems to reload everything. There's probably time to load 100Mb of data in the time it takes. As a software engineers with 22 years experience I'd say someone has become really sloppy at EA Games.

The lasting dissatisfaction is weapon effects, when my sights are square on and I pull the trigger the guy should fall and yet sometimes it's taking a couple of shots with the sniper rifle when I can see that I'm aiming for a high chest shot at under a hundred yards. At other times I can shoot someone with a pistol from a moving boat. Then I'm using an anti tank gun and it's not hitting even close to point of aim at 25 yards but it's still getting the job done. Later again I'm shooting down Zeros with a BAR... an almost impossible task in the real world, and yet I can shoot down two in a couple of minutes.

On the up side the sounds are wonderful, I shoot WWII era weapons outdoors and the sounds they user are pretty realistic, the music also isn't offensively intrusive though I did turn it off after a couple of hours.

The graphics weren't much payback for the high end resources needed. No better than in games two or three years old. Certainly nowhere near the visual pleasure that "Serious Sam: The Second Encounter" was two years ago. Serious Sam makes vastly better use of the music too.

There's lots I don't like about this game, the gameplay is nothing like as much of a pleasure as Quake 2. Mostly you are confined to narrow corridors dressed up with objects you can't cross, but there's never really much scenary in scope, move far and you are out of the level. I'll finish this game because I started it, but I won't buy another EA game until I hear good third party reviews.

For me, for now, EA has lost the plot.

First of all ignore the idiots that reviewed this game just because THEY NEEDED IT SOOOO BAD and gave it 5 stars just because they wanted Pacific Assault to get high ratings...such immature little weenies!!!!

MOH, when first released, really rocked the gaming world. But after the release of Call Of Duty, we can see how pathetic the MOH franchise now is.

I was loyal and loved MOH. I thought COD was just a simplistic rip off. I was wrong. COD really is a much better game, the weapons and graphics are more realistic, the sounds, the environments. Everything.

Pacific Assault is nothing more than MOD in the Pacific! Instead of Germans, you fight the Japanese. Duh!
It is not realistic, the graphics are dated, the missions are lame and you get level load after level load interrupting your game play!!!


Have you ever seen a rat in a maze? That is what it feels like playing this game! You have narrow paths they force you to follow! You don't have half the freedom that COD offers! As soon as a large confrontation is about to happen...the game does an AUTOSAVE. If that is not a predictable, dead give away I don't know what is. You get frantic and confusing objectives thrown at you, enemies thrown at you by the dozens. This game seemed more like Serious Sam than it did MOH.

You start off storming a beach and just as you are getting into the battle, you are knocked out!You wake up years earlier in boot camp and learn how to use the game. Then you are at Pearl Harbor just as it gets attacked. You spend time running through a ship saving men from the fire...wow...whoopeee! You get topside and have to shoot down Zero's as they attack. After all this garbage, you finally get to the jungle and have some fun. But not really.

The levels are so scripted and predictable that you don't have any choice but to hit the enemy head on every time. I think the most annoying thing is that a simple bush or log trips you up!!! Moving around and getting around obstacles can be a real pain in the rear in this game!!!

The weapons are really terrible! Very inaccurate. Also very weak. An enemy can be 5 feet from me and it takes 10 shots from a BAR rifle to kill the guy! Realistically, it would take 1 or 2. In COD it takes one or two. The sound effects of the guns are soft, dull and unfulfilling.

What did I like about this game?
Just 2 things -
1 - You have to call a medic over to get health. No stumbling over health packs...nice touch! Nice until they felt like compromising this strategy in some battle by dumping health packs on the ground and in fox holes in the middle of the game.

2 - You can trade up your weapons. They typically start you with a pistol and a rifle/machine gun. I drop the rifle and grab a machine gun as soon as I can. Now I can have 2 machine guns! Very handy. Or I can carry a sniper rifle and a machine gun! An awesome combo!


The graphics are ok. Nothing phenomenal. COD still kicks butt there too. The enemy AI is the same. Nothing new. They charge at you aggressively and sometimes it seems like they are flanking you but then they just disappear, never to return! Geeee, thanks a lot, how exciting!

You do get to play in a squad, which is a very welcome addition to this franchise. However, in many cases when your in a tight/narrow jungle path, your team mates just keep getting in the way. Oh and they NEVER die! NEVER!!!! Don't worry about protecting them. Just kill until the enemy is gone. Your teammates will miraculously survive every time unless the game is scripted to cause a death(which happens a few times). Even with this benefit, the levels get redundant! Go here, get attacked. go here, get attacked. The storyline seems like an after thought or even nonexistant.

Let me say that MOD:Allied Assault and the Spearhead Expansion pack were both really fun and I feel I got my money's worth. The Breakthrough Expansion pack was just a snack to tide us over until Pacific Assault was done.

Pacific Assault is now finished and it is NOT WORTH the purchase.

As always, my advice is, wait...WAIT...save your money, download and play the demo when available and then wait until this game is on sale after X-Mas. If you download the demo, play it and really enjoy it...then play it again on a harder setting and see if you still want to buy the game. If so, then go for it. You can either be patient and listen to a guy that is only trying to SAVE you your MONEY...or just fork over your money and be disappointed later.

Like most reading this I love the WWII shooter, great attention and detail went into MOH:AA and Call Of Duty. The expansion packs for both of these games were very well done and were worth the money. Now enter Medal Of Honor Pacific Assault a total disapointment to the genre, It appears only as eye candy, the graphics are excellent, but you can't base the strength of a game on the graphics alone. The game suffers from a number of little problems that become much larger as the game progresses. The first problem being that you don't have the feel of the first MOH, I felt the original set a good standard for this genre and Call Of Duty refined it even further, this version however has abandoned it, if something works you should leave it alone and try to focus on the story, the gameplay and the graphics engine, I was hoping to feel as if this would be a transition into the new game from the original but it was anything but. The "near death" experience in the game is ridiculous, and you will see it over and over so get used to it, the medic aspect is also annoying, he must rush over and heal you before the enemy comes over and stomps you in the face or shoots you at point blank range while just looming in the distance is your medic or other squad mate standing around and watching and doing nothing while you are brutally killed. Get this he can only heal you four times in a mission, where did he get his medical training? and he's constantly vomitting while treating your wounds!! so don't go looking for health packs they are almost impossible to find when you need one. I would have prefered to just die on the spot as in the original. The load times are also bad, whether you are starting a new level or just loading the autosave after being killed. The game has a different type of savegame where it seems you only can have one manual save, not multiple ones to choose from. You can save as many times as you like but your newest save overwrites your last manual save, so if you decide to save at a spot that may prove to have been a bad idea don't go looking for the save just before it because it doesn't exist, you could loose several minutes if you have to resume at a computer autosave to get back to where you originally were, sometimes up to 10 minutes or more. The weapons in the game are very limited, I felt like I was the enemy after awhile, because I almost exclusively had to use their shoddy weapons. I don't ever remember getting my hands on a Garrand or M1A1, when I was out of ammo I had to grab the enemy's weapon which is okay but I practically used their weapons throughout the entire game, even the sniper rifle, didn't we bring enough of our own weapons with us to this war? I also can't stand how my squad mates tell me to be "quiet" and then as soon as I throw a grenade everybody yells "frag, get down", you really loose the element of surprise with these squad tactics, they blew it with this version of MOH, it really is the little things in this game that are important, and they are all awol. My squad mates never die, they spew cliches constantly, you can't skip the cut scenes and you are always the guy to carry out the critical tasks while receiving no support from your team and the enemy bonzai charges become predictable. Oh and by the way just wait till you experience the "fighter plane" sequence, I almost threw my DVD version in the garbage right on the spot, "Hey Tommy climb out of the gunners position at 5 thousand feet and crawl up front to the pilots position and take over the controls of the plane" after your pilot bails out over the ocean because he has blood in his eyes, then become a crash course pilot, heavy emphasis on the crash part, shoot down zeros and bomb aircraft carriers and battleships. This game could have been great but it feels like it was rushed onto shelves for a quick buck. Call Of Duty puts this game to shame, if you don't own it grab this instead it is what a WWII shooter should be, they should have taken notes from these guys, even the original MOH got it right and is a respectable game. I feel that after spending $ 59.99 on a game I should get something outstanding like DOOM 3 or Half-Life 2, this game is almost as big a disappointment as Men Of Valor. Time to hand out a few apologies EA, no wonder PC Gamer only gave this game a 79%(good) rating. Oh well perhaps Brothers In Arms will be something to look forward to.

I'm not a huge fan of the Medal of Honor series, but decided to try this one mainly because I got it for a good price on eBay. Having just finished Half Life 2, which was relatively easy on Normal mode, I made the horrible mistake of playing this game on Hard mode. After much cursing and reloads, I finally finished.

It wouldn't have been so bad except your teamates are morons and the modeling is, at times, really bad. (In one sequence I had a perfect sniping spot beneath a building, but the game engine wouldn't let me actually shoot anything since the shots were being stopped at the "wall".)

What did impress me was the enemy AI. It was by no means perfect, but worlds better than Doom 3 and several other games.

The single biggest problem with the game is the flying level. It was lame, badly implemented and just plain absurd. A game based on this level would be easiliy considered one of the worse games of all time.

And then there are the long load times. I played this on a brand new Athlon 64 3500 based system with blindingly fast everything and it was slow. I can't imagine load times on old systems.

It's also quite obvious the program has major memory leaks. The game slowed to a near halt several times. I was usually able to hit the ESC key enough to get to the main menu to quit, but a few times I had to hit the old reset button.

In the end, the real dissapointment with this game is that it could have been so much better.

I have to say that this is the most immersive MOH instalment yet. Whilst I and other gamers I know are getting rather bored of WWII shooters set in Europe against the forces of the Third Reich, this game breathes new life into our gameplay. The game takes you from boot camp right the way through to the final mission on Tarawa Atoll and feels rather too real at times. I am certainly not used to bayonet or samurai sword charges from the opposition when they run out of ammo. That really picks up the game a notch. This games absolutely rocks. It is immersive and sucks you right in. There are a few AI annoyances but the rest of the game makes up for it. Do make sure you have a reasonably up to date rig to run this beast as it's a system hogger. Good system = great gaming.

From start to finish, MOHPA is a blast. The single-player levels are intense and extremely challenging. You get to use the full-range of small arms employed in that theater. You even get to fly a fighter and knock out an aircraft carrier and destroyer. Very cool.

You start in boot-camp, move on to Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal, Makin Atoll, and finally Tarawa Atoll. That brings you through 1943. I assume that additional games will take you to Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa.

Something interesting also happened as the game progressed. You're placed in a squad with four other characters, who stick with you from boot camp to the last episode in the Battle of Tarawa Atoll. Men in your squad are shot down and injured from time to time (of course). During firefights, instead of running for cover, I ran out and grabbed the injured and then dropped them near the corpsman. Very strange. I really got into working as a squad member.

The Director's Edition contains background historical information on the Pacific Theater. It includes interviews with several veterans of that conflict (similar to interviews conducted with vets in the Band of Brothers series).

If you're a military history buff and love FPS games (as I do), you'll have to buy this one. It'll blow you away.

I enjoyed this game through most of the missions. It has a training mission to learn the first person controls. Then you get into it. Some thought is necessary to complete missions successfully, I like. What I don't appreciate, in any game, is where the vehicle controls are made difficult just to make the game harder. You are able to fly an airplane, but the game doesn't support a joy stick. I know what has to be done for the mission and the task is made harder by the slow controls(having to repeatedly lift the mouse from the desk to turn), so even veteran gamers must repeat the same portion over and over. I could create a joystick profile. Load times can be long for missions and I needed to enable shaders 2.0 on my ATI graphics card to increase the speed of the game. I bought this game because I really enjoyed Brothers In Arms: Road to Hill 30. It's a different play experience than this.

I'm not a part of the MOH "community," as much as a guy who has played through (and mostly enjoyed) the MOH and COD series. Even "Breakthrough."

Although I'd read mixed reviews, I decided to buy MOHPA a few days ago. I really wanted to find the good in it, but after about 8 hours of play, I've concluded that it the game has basic gameplay and efficiency problems that prevent it from being the jewel its designers might have envisioned.

While I love the graphics, especially the advanced shader features, I feel like I'm swimming in mud when I play in SP. I don't expect MOHAA responsiveness by any means, but this game drags.

More on gameplay: "Snipertown" is the only MOH level to seriously frustrate me during the MOH series. But a few levels that seem impossible can make a gamer more persistent and more observant.

Yet, I'm a stuck at a few saves past "Campfire" on "veteran" in MOHPA and I'm already wondering if pushing on is worth the effort and time. I literally have a headache from playing. Not an adrenaline-caffeine headache, just a headache.

On the graphics front, MOHPA is gorgeous, but seems a bigger suck on resources than games of similar graphical quality. For instance, I can play the COD 2 demo fairly comfortably on my mainstream rig (A64 2800, 1GB Corsair, 9800 Pro), but have to make seemingly much bigger sacrifices graphically to play MOHPA at acceptable frame rates.

I could blame my relatively old hardware, but for comparison,I had a excellent gaming experience two years ago when running COD on my Athlon XP 1600/512/Radeon 9200. That hardware was not exactly cutting edge, either.

Regarding load times: I have decent HD access speed, so my load times are perhaps 30 seconds for levels and 20 seconds after deaths -- better than some reports, but this is still too long. Part of the reason I could handle "Snipertown" in MOHAA was that I was instantly back in the action.

In MOHPA, already know after I'm shot once that I need to reload the level if I hope to have any health left by the end, but this reloading process takes forever. Spending a minute "dying" and waiting for a medic (when you know he doesn't have enough medicine left to sustain you through the leve) when you're on your 15th attempt to cut through a level is maddening.

To me, MOHPA is an ambitious, but severely flawed game. I can grasp where the production team was headed, and I think this game could have been a jewel. But its flashes of brilliance do not compensate for the mediocre user experience.

The most interesting aspect of MOHPA for the gamer, I think, are that one can see how truly important gameplay and optimization are to a game. Another few months of development, and this game might have been a COD for the Pacific Theatre. As it is, it's an interesting tech demo that has already been surpassed by better supported, better executed WW2 games.

I recommend this game only for big fans of WW2 games who have cutting-edge hardware, a surplus of patience, and can tolerate spending $30 on a game that -- all told -- will likely be a little disappointing.

This game is so friggin unbelievable... I downloaded the free demo from EA Games and I just love this. I have to buy the director's edition when I get money. Historically very accurate as to what the battles were really like in the pacific back in the 40's. My grandpa fought against the japs and after playing this game, I have so much more respect for him now than I ever did before not only for what he did for our country with protecting our way of life but also for the intensity and willpower to survive something so brutal and awful. This game has probably close to 50 different weapons. BAR, the M1A1, .50 caliber machine guns, grenades, and so much more...

After seeing what my grandpa went through in the pacific, this game was a very shocking reality about how violent and graphic warfare really is. When the japs came at my character across the airfield with about 50 guys drawing samurai swords, and bayonets attached to their rifles I was like, "oh f***"! I jumped on the .50 caliber and took them all out. If you buy this game, or even just like to play first person shooter games, you will not be disappointed at all... It is worth every penny spent