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90 of 96 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Fun -- punctuated by horrible loading times, December 20, 2004
Fun:3.0 out of 5 stars
Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault, at times, has some excellent action, and these are the times that make it worth playing. Unfortunately, it has a handful of really bad sequences, and the most annoying loading times of any PC game.
Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault, when it's on, when you're actually playing the darn thing, can be tense, exciting, and thrilling. But, often, you are looking at a progress bar instead. Hoooooooo, boy does this game suffer from loading times. I would have to say that this game has the worst ratio of "loading screen to gameplay time" that I have ever experienced. The bad loading times amplify the incredibly annoying quick save/reload fests that you get into near the end of the game, which leaves you with a bitter taste in your mouth about this game.
To some degree, Pacific Assault follows other World War 2 games like Allied Assault and Call of Duty. The game is mostly linear, and it contains a lot of mayhem mixed in with scripted events. However, this is definitely not just another World War 2 game. It is different in some good ways.
For starters, Pacific Assault's on-foot action is less scripted than other WWII games have been. The jungle firefights remind me a lot of last year's "Vietcong" than Allied Assault. You creep slowly through the jungle and encounter small groups of Japanese troops, and then engage them in short but sweet firefights. The firefights are mostly unscripted, relying instead upon this game's underrated AI. Both your squad mates and your enemies are pretty smart about staying alive and using cover. It's very satisfying to relieve your pinned down squad by finding a way to flank your enemies, and then blast them from their rear. Sometimes, the hardest part of a firefight is just finding where the enemy is hiding. Using cover is paramount to surviving, and so is popping out from behind cover to deliver quick blasts with your weapon. Enemies will attempt to do the same to you. However, sometimes, when you are winning a battle, the last couple of guys in a Japanese squad will rush at you screaming in a mad, desperate Banzai frenzy. This leads to some truly memorable moments.
The medic is a great mechanic that seems to borrow from games like Halo and Vietcong. The idea is that instead of picking up frequent health packs and armor, you can be healed if you find some safe cover for a while. This adds a tactical level to the game that most first person shooters don't have.
The jungle scenes are the best part of this game in every way. It's too bad that you have to play the game for an hour and a half before you experience them. That's how long it takes you to get through the tutorial level and the disappointing Pearl Harbor level. The game mixes up the action quite a bit. Specifically, there are rail-shooter and turret-shooter sequences sprinkled here and there, where you shoot at enemies while riding in the back of a truck or operate an anti-aircraft gun and shoot down Japanese Zeroes. There is even a flying mission. None of these other missions are particularly memorable, and some of them are quite bad. There is one ridiculous "shoot down Zeroes with an AA gun" scene that is literally impossible until you learn that there is a lame trick that makes it easy to complete in about 60 seconds. It takes dozens of trial-and-error quick save and reload sequences to learn this (or, you can look on the internet for it), and this totally ruins that part of the game.
The visuals aren't as nice as Half-Life 2 or Far Cry, but they are still very good. The water, fire, and smoke, all look very nice. Best of all is the most beautiful and realistic looking sky that I have ever seen. The jungle is also very convincing. The music is sort of generic, but it's high quality stuff. Best of all, the game feels very authentic. It maintains the high drama of the other World War 2 games, while giving it a different feel too.
The campaign ends after about 10 hours, which isn't very long, considering that at least 2 or 3 of them are spent looking at the loading screen. The way that the loading screens disrupt this game's flow cannot be understated. The ending is also horribly unsatisfying. I absolutely hated the ending level of this game with a passion. It is a maddeningly and impossibly difficult, unforgving quick save fest where you are constantly getting cut down by two or three machine gun nests at a time, all of which can reduce you from full health to zero in about two seconds. The entire last two hours of the game is filled with trial-and-error and trying to scamper from cover to cover in increments of about three feet, reloading your game constantly as you get cut down in seconds. The last level is filled with barbed wire (which you cannot climb over) and invisible walls, which funnel you into these death trap trenches that have machine gun nests awaiting you at the end, and absolutely no alternate path. The game gives you no flamethrower or bazooka, and no ability to call in naval strikes. The design for this level is abysmal, and it's a shame that the awesome jungle levels are overshadowed by this frustrating turd in the punch bowl.
The verdict? I guess it's worth a look.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Another good game, but....., May 10, 2005
Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars
I love the Medal of Honor series. And I could not wait to play Pacific Assault.
The graphics were very good. The main problem though was that I couldn't turn everything up (I have a P4 2.8, 1gb ram, 128mb Geforce fx 5200 video card) or this game was extremely laggy. It was even worse on-line. I can only imagine what it would look like with everything turned up.
The sound was very good. Everything sounded life like and with headphones on it was eveb better.
The gameplay was excellent. I did hate the levels trapped in forest. It seemed like a 1/3 of the game were levels like this. But it also made it different from all other WWII FPS games. It looked nothing like those other games. And when the Japanese soldiers started losing, they would banzai charge you. There were a couple of levels where they just kept charging and you wondered if it would ever end. And you didn't pick up health on the ground like the other games. You had to wait for a medic to heal you and your buddies, but he could only heal you so many times.
The levels outside of the jungle though were the best and most of the missions were solid, action packed, and very intense. This game was almost as intense as the Call of Duty games.
As for the on-line side, it wasn't very good. The choice of servers isn't very good and there weren't alot of those that seemed to have people playing. Some of the maps I had seen weren't designed very well and I couldn't find anyone playing the objective based servers. It was all deathmatch. I haven't really spent much time playing it (been playing Counterstrike Source, Half-Life 2 death match, and Tribes:Veangeance), but hopefully more people and servers will show up and there will be chances to play it. But then the game is also very laggy (I have a DSL connection at 3Mbps). I guess I will have to get a new cpu to keep with next generation of games.
Overall, I give this game a good rating as I was really wound up playing this game.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Don't waste your money, November 29, 2004
Fun:1.0 out of 5 stars
It is a crying shame that the quality of this game is so poor. I have never written a review of a game before, but this game left me feeling ripped-off and you should know about it.
I purchased the original MOH:Allied Assault (at first-issue time) and the Spearhead and Breakthough Expansion packs. Those games, especially Allied Assault and Spearhead were excellent. Breakthrough is so-so. Even those games, as good as they were, still earned EA Games a lot of complaints due to their lack of support for some issues.
Then, I found out that the original developers of Medal of Honor were dissatisfied with the way EA Games was handling the publishing and quality-control. Those developers left EA Games and went with a different publisher to produce Call of Duty. Call of Duty is a GREAT game of the same flavor. This should tell you something about EA Games. It should also tell you that the original artists no longer have input to the development of the Medal of Honor series. So, who are the yo-yos that are producing Pacific Assault?
I didn't listen to my "inner-voice" and got MOH:Pacific Assault anyway. It "looked" good. Man did I step in it! MOH:PA is an absolute DOG! I have top-line, high performance computer equipment (3.2 Ghz P4, 1 Gig Ram, on an Asus P4c800-E Deluxe MoBo, and a Geforce 5700-Ultra Video Card on Win XP-Pro) and it ran SLOOOOW. The mouse lagged BIG time. I went online and found that the very first patch (and only patch at the time) for this game was just to address the input-lag problem. Mind you, it didn't "correct" it, it just made it less prominent... the problem is still there.
Now, you gotta ask yourself... why would EA Games ever release a product with such a prominent problem? This demonstrates a complete lack of customer-concern. However, even that patch didn't snap it up to the playability level that the older MOH games had.
On the plus side (what little there is of it), the game runs pretty good in Single-Player Mode where you just play against the computer. It's still a little laggy, even with the patch.
The minuses are enormous in my opinion. I buy a game because of its online multiplayer capability, because that's where the REAL FUN is... when you go online and play against/with other human players. But this game fails miserably in that department. The game is almost unplayable when online, and I have a cable connection at 3Mbits down and 256K up.
In MOH:Allied Assault, and Spearhead, I run my video at 1280x960 with the detail cranked up somewhere between the default and the Max. It all runs without any lag. Not with Pacific Assault though. Don't even THINK about running it at those settings. I was lucky to get it to run at 1024x768 without it crashing. Same computer system in both cases.
If your PC isn't the latest and greatest light-dimming speed demon, then you should forget about this game altogether.
EA Games has no excuse to justify the poor quality and lack of playability of Pacific Assault. This game qualifies as a rip-off of your money.
You can get much more enjoyment and playability over a longer term if you get Call of Duty instead.
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