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Medal of Honor : Pacific Assault is a WWII-themed FPS game that’s way better than it’s progenitor, Medal of Honor : Allied Assault . The Germans are given a break this time, and now you have to face the even more crazier tropical jungle-dwelling Japanese forces.

It’s also important to say that Pacific Assault is in no way similar to Allied Assault. As I’ve mentioned in its review, in the first of the series you mostly go solo, but there are also sequences where you fight alongside teammates such as in Omaha Beach. But in Pacific Assault, you always have a squad to fight alongside you.

The game is in every way better than it’s forefather. The AI is way more aggressive, and it’s gameplay mechanics are improved as well. But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have it’s flaws ! While you’ll constantly face hordes of Imperial Japanese soldiers, you can’t help but notice that sometimes they tend to act weird : such as clipping in stuff. But that doesn’t always happen. The AI will start banzai-charging at you with their bayonets when they run out of ammo, or when you get too close to them. They’ll come after you if you hide around too much, and their medic will heal their troops if you don’t finish them off quickly.

Uhh... who's there ?

Speaking of medics, in MoHPA, you don’t walk on health packs or bottles all the time, instead, you have a corpsman in your squad that you’ll heavily depend on. It’ll take a couple of seconds for him to heal you, so you must find cover. As a squad, you guys must stick out for each other. So you’ll find that sometimes your squad mates will get hit and will fall, so you must pick him up, get him to cover, and call the doc. You also have a simple yet handy squad command system such as advancing, opening fire, retreating and rallying. But this doesn’t mean that you’re the boss… no, you have a superior to follow. You’ll only get to issue the commands on desperate occasions.

Fortunately, you actually have cinematics in the game, and a proper story. The storytelling is very profound, as cutscenes are really suggestive. You play as a marine, Thomas ‘Tommy’ Conlin over the course of several years. The campaign will take around 8-12 hours to complete, depending on the difficulty. What’s also cool is that the main menu theme will change depending on how far you progressed the game. The uniforms, and weapons will also change. Speaking of weapons, there are a lot of weapons in the game. At some point in the game you’ll even get to fly a plane. Though it’s quite tricky and you’ll want to finish the scenario asap.

Let's crash this partayh !!

The tropical Japanese environment is lush and beautiful. You’ll find that you’ll always have to go through the bush to avoid enemy road patrols, you’ll always storm villages, you’ll always ambush and get ambushed. The enemy will always outnumber you. You’ll be under machine gun fire lots of times. All these tense moments add to the realism. You can’t really say that the graphics are of epic proportions, they are still pretty good.

Not only do you get to visit the jungle, but you can also play through Pearl Harbor and other missions outside the jungle.

You’ll stumble across annoying things such as long loading screens, no matter how much you turned the settings down. You’ll always get appraised by your squad mates about what a good shot you’ve delivered to the enemy, even if you’re the only one that sees it. Or you’ll see that if you are a little far away from the squad, they’ll say : ‘Tommy’s on the move, let’s go, let’s go !’ all the time. The AI might also act weird, like I’ve mentioned before. But these things don’t heavily detract from the overall experience.

Ok, let's move out.

Extra things such as medals, hidden objectives, and the ‘realistic’ difficulty mode that disables your HUD and crosshair will make you want to come back and play again till perfection. Oh, and there’s also this cool at-the-verge-of-death moments if you’re down and your corpsman has ran out of bandages : a jap comes to you and stabs you. There are other cases too that I won’t spoil !!

The multiplayer features 3 modes : classic free for all and team deathmatch, but there’s also a mode called invader. This is like a campaign scenario in multiplayer, where you must blow up objectives, radio HQ or retrieve intelligence. It’s pretty fun, and there’s an auto-matchmaker that connects you to a random server if you don’t want to browse the lobby.

Overall, the excellent campaign, realistic tropical atmosphere and overall great gameplay and multiplayer make up for small flaws such as quirky AI and long loading times.