Medal of Honor: Warfighter – Steam Deck Review
If you've been following this blog for a while, you probably know that I love playing games from the PS3 era on the Steam Deck, as most of them run brilliantly and look breathtakingly beautiful; especially on the Steam Deck OLED. Today, I'll be discussing Medal of Honor: Warfighter, the direct follow-up to the 2010 reboot of Medal of Honor. The following points do not include any spoilers. I might dive into the story a bit at the end of the post, but I'll definitely mark that section in bold as a spoiler so you can skip it if you haven't experienced the story firsthand. All screenshots in this post were taken on a Steam Deck, by the way.
Overall Rating
- Score: 7/10 (And that's because I'm into military stuff; otherwise, it would be a 5/10. This is a bit sad, because you can definitely tell how much love went into making this game, but it also (unfortunately) shows signs of an identity crisis/other issues during development.
- Should you play?: In my opinion, yeah; especially if you're into military shooters.
- General conclusion: It's somehow a step backward and a step forward from MoH 2010.
What's good?
- Works out of the box without any necessary tweaks. + It recognizes the Steam Deck's controllers automatically. Medal of Honor 2010, for example, doesn't have any gamepad UI, and you have to tweak some layout settings to make it perfectly playable, which was actually weird because the game recognizes the Steam Deck input, even activates aim support, and everything works with the buttons and stuff. It just needed a few button layout tweaks. This game doesn't need any of that.
- Graphics can be maxed out with no frame drops or glitches. Despite that, the battery lasts quite a while; satisfyingly so. And I should say, this game looks magnificent on the Steam Deck. Although I enjoyed the scenery and the places the game took me in the first game more, Warfighter doesn't disappoint when it comes to vistas. There are some truly breathtaking and immersive levels in this game! I can not pass without mentioning how pleasing the particle effects are to look at in this game, especially the flare effects on some levels!
- Gun, environmental, and explosion sounds are punchy and very pleasing to the ears. They make you feel like you're in the battlefield.
- Gunplay is very satisfying. Especially considering that the firing mode toggle from the previous game kept being included: With most guns, you can choose between automatic and single-fire mode, depending on your tactical situation. Your bullets can penetrate through most objects on the battlefield, and this partial destruction makes the warzone feel more dynamic; though not to a great extent. Just a heads-up.
- Animations are simple, clean, and pleasing to the eye.
- Leaning/peeking is always a welcome feature in FPS games for me, and in Warfighter, it works wonderfully. A great round of applause to the team who implemented this feature for gamepads. It adds an additional layer of depth to the gameplay if you want to follow a more tactical approach and play the game on higher difficulties. Your character does not automatically lean right/left/upwards like in most modern games; instead, you have to press and hold L1 while moving the camera in the direction you want your character to lean. It might sound a bit cumbersome when you read it here, but during gameplay, I never thought it was difficult or tiring to lean this way.
- Cinematics are pre-rendered but are very detailed and high quality.
- This is a feature from the previous game, but I really appreciate that you can request ammunition from your squadmates. The only thing I don't like is that you can basically request unlimited ammo, which can make you a bit reckless with how many bullets you fire.
- I really, really enjoyed being able to slide right after running in Medal of Honor (2010), and that feature remains.
- Overall, compared to Medal of Honor (2010), movement feels smoother.
- Throughout most of the game, the UI rarely appears on the screen and never distracts you from the action.
- I am not sure if they do this all the time, but when you kill an enemy, your squadmates confirm your kill. I thought it was a nice touch, especially if you are playing on higher difficulties.
What's Questionable or Bad?
Not all of the points here are bad, but they can be questionable or bizarre.
- Coming from Call of Duty, I thought it was a bit weird not being able to throw grenades back. However, it is ultimately a gameplay feature choice. It's not something I considered bad or lacking, but it definitely grabbed my attention.
- I don't want to call the AI bad, but it is not good either. What it is, is definitely questionable. I had a lot of issues with it, so get ready for a lot of remarks: Sometimes (and by sometimes, I mean A LOT of times), your AI teammates jump in front of you or change cover and get in your way, getting stuck in crossfire, and you accidentally shoot them. This results in them yelling, "BLUE!" "WATCH YOUR FIRE!" "WE'RE ON THE SAME TEAM, MATE!" It happened so often during my gameplay (I was playing on hard difficulty, which meant I had to be extra careful with my shots, since you can die very easily in this mode) that it started getting on my nerves by the end of the game. They kept jumping in front of me and getting stuck between my and enemy fire. What makes this issue even more annoying is that you can't really rely on your squadmates to take care of the enemy AI, because there were many occasions where the enemy would stand right in front of the friendly AI, and they just kept firing at each other without anyone dying. While their failure to make your job easier is something you can overlook up to a point, them actively making it harder was frustrating. Another problem with the AI is that they usually occupy the spaces where the player would take cover and refuse to move. If I recall correctly, in CoD, when you take cover at the same spot as your squadmate, they always make space for you. There's a mission in the game where you board a ship, and I wanted to sneak behind the enemies without firing my gun or running, but the enemy knew my exact location even though, as I said, I didn't shoot my gun and was sneaking behind them. The problem here is that this isn't a consistent issue. You play this level from two angles (without spoilers), and the second time my sneaking methods worked. There were also some moments when the AI got alerted (maybe scripted?) even though there was nothing to alert them, and they went into "war mode."
- Scripted sequences take you out of the game and break the game's world realism. This becomes more noticeable toward the end of the game. The parts where you need to kill enemies in a stealthy manner leave no room for creativity, and even if you want to fail the mission willingly or unknowingly, you either can't, or you really need to go out of your way to do so. For example, if you need to kill someone stealthily, even if you miss your shot a few times or shoot right next to their ear, the enemies don't notice it at all. By the end of the game, there's a guy shooting at you with an LMG from behind a truck. I’m not sure if this was because he was wearing some kind of immunity armor, or if the car had to move to another position and he had to keep suppressing us, but after shooting him in the head 6-7 times before the car moved and he still didn’t die, it really broke the immersion of the game for me. At that point, I kept playing just to finish the game (this event happens in the last mission, anyway). In addition, I think the game is interrupted too often with switches to a bot (in some missions, you switch to a model battle bot), switching to firing from a helicopter, etc.
- There are some weird gameplay decisions here, like the heavy armor guys. They take A LOT of bullets to kill, which makes the game feel like a looter shooter in my eyes, and I thought it was an unnecessary touch. It doesn't really add anything to the game besides making you shoot more at one guy, but it definitely breaks the immersion. Another weird gameplay choice is the automated night vision. The game switches to night vision in scripted sequences, meaning you can not enable or disable it at will. There were many parts of the game where I thought it was too dark and would have liked to activate night vision myself.
- I loved the atmospheric, weapon, and other sounds in this game, but one pet peeve was that character audio was muffled. I had a very hard time understanding what some characters were saying at parts.
- The breaching mechanic doesn't add or take away anything from the game. I don't think it's a bad feature, but it doesn't really serve any gameplay purpose.
- The levels are EXTREMELY linear. There's no room for creativity or different approaches. If an event is scripted (e.g., use the machine gun to take care of the enemy), you can’t just kill the enemy with your regular weapon and move on. Nope. You have to use that LMG attached to the truck. Or, if you skip it, I guess the game is very generous with the time it gives you to mount the LMG.
- The story is all over the place and hard to follow. I understand that the game developers wanted to incorporate real-life inspired events from different parts of the world, and while it sounds great on paper, the execution was poorly done. There were also some poorly executed cutscenes right from the start. For example, at the very beginning of the game, 'Task Force Mako' surfaces from the water. Then 'Mother' performs a tactical hand gesture, but 'Preacher,' the playable character, doesn't even look at 'Mother' when he does it but executes it anyway. One could argue that 'Preacher' moves because 'Mother' moves, but then, what was the point of the gesture? Having such a small mistake right from the beginning is bothersome.
- By the end of the game, some bugs appear. There are also minor issues, such as glasses not being destructible with a knife.
Conclusion
I decided to discuss the story in more detail in another post for those who, like me, found it a bit confusing; perhaps even making a direct comparison to the predecessor. Overall, I’d recommend playing it (not super highly, but still) if you’re into military shooters, despite its flaws.