A review of a game

Before you read the rest of this post, go read John Walker's review of Medal of Honor: Warfighter at Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Note that the review only deals with the single player mode.

The review is exactly what you'd expect from a guy that didn't want to play the game in the first place (and with good reason). The lack of enthusiasm is understandable. Electronic Arts has long been obsessed with knocking Activision from atop its modern military shooter throne, to the point that it reflexively grafts single player appendages onto otherwise fully-functional multiplayer bodies. In the race to the bottom of the modern warfare abyss, EA just can't help itself. Committing finite resources away from the core competencies of Battlefield -- and the rebooted MoH -- has become a habit.

This is not, however, a reversal of the "tacked-on multiplayer" trend of years past. The path that Call of Duty has blazed demands an EPIC single player campaign, full of showy explosions and toppled buildings, overwrought dialogue and oppressively scripted game play. There's nothing tacked-on about it. It requires a massive investment of money and developer time to produce those five or six hours of single player drudgery. 

Welcome to Medal of Honor: Warfighter.

The reviews have been unkind: MoH:W's metascore is sitting at an abysmal 55 as of this writing. Given that the publisher declined to distribute review copies until mere hours before the game was released, EA may have known that the single player was garbage. Maybe it realized -- just a bit too late -- that the format has atrophied. Or, the delay might have had something to do with the massive day one patch. Either way, the decision was clearly a defensive one. 

EA has taken too long to realize that its shooters aren't just competing with Call of Duty. Rather, both Battlefield and CoD are threatened by every new game that doesn't seek to reprise the modern military shooter formula. There are a lot of them out there. It started, perhaps, with the asymmetric multiplayer of L4D, and games like Borderlands, Portal, Metro 2033, and Dishonored have carried the banner of the truly original IP to ascendancy. Maybe, just maybe, EA's business model of chasing the money is finally backfiring.

We can hope.