Medal of Honor Airborne

So, here is my first official post as the actual runner of this blog. I know I technically did that intro one a few weeks back, but I'm not really counting that one.

I spent a good while trying to figure out what I really wanted to talk about for my first actual blog post/article/whatever you want to call this, and I decided to talk about one of the lesser-known games in the Medal of Honor (MoH) series, Medal of Honor Airborne. Medal of Honor is one of my favorite game series ever. Though I don't get too much enjoyment out of them now, they were a big part of my childhood, and I usually have a consistent level of nostalgia for them.

Medal of Honor Airborne is a World War II FPS that was released on August 28th 2007 for the the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Wii and PC. At this point in time, Medal of Honor had kind of been losing its footing in the market mainly due to the popularity of Call of Duty. Just 3 months later, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was released and buried Airborne beneath it, and it's a shame, too, because Airborne did a lot of new things for the MoH series. The game turned from the traditional linear FPS game play and went with a more open kind of approach. It wasn't open world, but it was an iteration of that.

You play as a fictional paratrooper named Boyd Travers, who is part of the US 82nd Airborne Division. Each mission brings you to a specific battle or event during World War II. For example, the first mission of the game drops you into Operation Husky, which was the Allied invasion of Sicily. Each mission begins by you selecting which weapons you want to use and then paradropping into a battle.

What made this game nonlinear was that, instead of following specific paths, you could pick and choose where you dropped into the battle and complete the objectives given to you in any order. This gave players more ways to strategize. Did they want to land in the safe zones, conveniently marked by green smoke flares? Or would they want to take a more risky approach and pick a dangerous landing area that was closer to an objective.

Unfortunately, the way the game was designed made it hard to construct an interesting story. The story for each mission had to be simple since the player could complete each level in any order they wished. The game follows the events of the war closely and doesn't really create a historical fiction narrative like the series' predecessors. Personally, this wasn't too much of a negative for me mainly because I barely remembered the stories from the other games. In fact, I didn't really remember the story for this game either. I had to look it up when I started writing this.

And while the story was nowhere near its strong point, the music is where it shines. Michael Giacchino composed the music for Airborne. Giacchino began his career composing music for video games but quickly started writing for Television and Hollywood. Without going into a full retrospective on him, as I would love to do a podcast episode on his career, he is probably most famous for writing the soundtrack for the Pixar movie Up.

To wrap this all up, I just want to encourage you all to try this game out. It honestly is a hidden gem. Not just of the series but in general. Since the game was overshadowed by CoD 4, it has gone, I would argue, criminally unrecognized. What is one of your favorite underrated or hidden gem games?