Growing up in the 2000s, I played my share of WWII games. My favorite series was Medal of Honor. I remember dad playing Frontline, playing the co-op campaign in Rising Sun with my sister, and finally playing Airborne on PS3. I always preferred the cinematic nature of MOH over the bombastic action of COD. Feeling nostalgic for the era of WWII shooters, I picked up Allied Assault on GOG. I hadn’t played Allied Assault before, but many people seem to consider it a high point of the series.

The gameplay is still steeped in the old school FPS mindset. I always forget how much I miss being able to aim down the sights. Instead, you have a crosshair on the screen you use for all of your aiming. The only time you aim a gun is when you are using a sniper rifle, which makes sense. You get to use a small selection of WWII firearms. All the big names are here: Thompsons, MP40s, BARs, 1911s, & Garands. I realized that Medal of Honor is why I believed a Garand could not physically be reloaded until the entire clip was spent. For the most part, the shooting feels good. You can hit enemies through chain link fences, there’s not invisible walls on them. I did notice a few occasions where I would be hitting a target center mass and the bullets seem to miss them.

Unfortunately, the enemies don’t seem to miss often. Once they see you, they’ve got you dead to rights. I also had to start thinking like an old FPS player. A trick I learned quick is the game loves to hide Germans in blind corners or behind doors. They also don’t always react by coming to investigate gunfire, instead waiting for you to walk into their line of sight. I can’t tell if that’s old game jank or the AI being smart enough to not rush towards where their buddy just died?

The first few missions are fun, you get to run around blasting Nazis, there’s a social stealth mission where you infiltrate a U-Boat base. Some missions have allies that follow you. I could never tell if the game expected me to try and keep them alive or treat them as expendable. There were a few times I could tell I wasn’t expected to save my allies, but not always.

The last two missions start to become more tedious than fun. They lean more into special operation stealth missions vs battle levels. Sniper Town has a reputation for being a ball buster. You are getting shot at from different directions, and the bad guys blend into the debris and brambles. From here on the game devolved into trial & error for me. I’d step out of a building, get shot for 80% of my health, try to find from where, then die or reload a save. The same applies to the Tiger Tank and the snowy forest level. In order to get through a level with more than 12% health you have to already know where the bad guys are. I’m of two minds, if I wanted to be very charitable, I could say this is the game being realistic, in that you don’t immediately know where you’re being shot from & camouflage actually works like camouflage. On the other hand, I was annoyed after playing the same section of game 4 or 5 times over again. I tapped out at the snowy forest level. I got enough out of the game and wasn’t having fun at that point.

One thing that surprised me about this game from 2002 is how well the graphics hold up. Allied Assault is running on the Quake engine, and everything is a bit blocky, but you can tell what everything is supposed to be. The gun models look good. The color palette of muted browns and greens does increase the issue of enemies and the background blending together. Still the game nails atmosphere. While I got tired of the sniper battles, the snowy forest level nailed that feeling of foreboding with the snowy haze and ambient noise. I felt tense as I was riding the landing craft towards Omaha Beach on D-Day. You could see the nerves on the faces of my boatmates too. One animation hiccup I encountered often was I’d shoot an enemy that was firing at me, and when he reacted by lowering his gun, he didn’t stop firing, the bullets just came out of the barrel at a 90° angle to hit me. Immersion breaking in a game that otherwise had a lot of good animations. Enemies would crouch or go prone, I saw an ally throw himself on a grenade, good stuff.

The one thing that Medal of Honor had above any other WWII shooter series was the music. I still love the soundtracks of the MOH series. It sounds like something straight out of Saving Private Ryan, which makes sense since this series was a creation of Steven Spielberg. I can’t state how much I love this music and the reoccurring themes used for both the Allies and Axis. When I think of ‘stereotypical Nazi bad guy music’ I think of the stinger Medal of Honor uses for them. I also noticed some of the ambient music felt similar to ambient tunes in Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb. I don’t know if it’s just because they’re both grand 1940s adventure music or if they shared audio designers?

The story isn’t particularly important here. Each mission is broken down into 3-4 levels that are self-contained. You get a mission briefing from your commander over a slideshow of historic photos and in-game images. Your goal is usually “sneak into this German base, steal/destroy item, escape”. You get to explore a variety of locations, like the North African coast, a secret research lab, or bombed out city. The “stealth” focus means you start more levels with a silenced pistol and sniper rifle than you do with the Garand and 1911. Honestly, the D-Day level just throws tossed in there out of obligation than for any story reason. I knew that since every mission was a self-contained vignette I wouldn’t be missing any big ending cutscene if I bailed out. Overall, I’m fine that the story isn’t more advanced than, go stop the Germans, because do we really need any overwrote justification to go shoot some Nazis.

All in all, Medal of Honor Allied Assault did scratch that itch of old WWII shooters for me and it doesn’t demand too much in the way of engagement that I was fine with dropping it once I had my fill. I do think the gameplay starts to get unfair in the last few levels. The musical score is still a bonafide classic & the highpoint of my whole experience. I know there’s some nostalgia for this game, & I wonder if I played Rising Sun if my nostalgia would blind me to its failings? Still you can get this for dirt cheap on GOG, so if you are wanting to go back to the era where WWII shooters reigned as king, I can recommend Allied Assault for as long as you can tolerate it.

The first Medal of Honor for the PC. No longer being held back by the limitations of the PS1, EA was able to make a fully authentic WWII experience. I can see why this was loved back in the day. Much of what you see in Call of Duty can be found here. If there was no MoH, there would be no CoD. But, this game shows its age in all aspects. It has been overshadowed by its rival, CoD, just a year later. There's no aiming down sights or even a zoom feature. Your cross-hairs don't change when moving, and you can't swap weapons. That's not to say that no fun can be had from this game even today, just make sure you aren't expecting what you saw in more modern WWII games, or even from the first CoD.

One thing to note is that I underestimated this game's difficulty. I thought I could breeze through the game on the medium difficulty. Boy, was I a fool. I should have known that "easy" was the normal back then. The game was quite frustrating as a result, and one particular level was just hell. There were also times you had to memorize where each enemy would spawn to get through. Please, do yourself a favor and play this game on easy, even if you think you're an FPS veteran. If you can look past the graphics and the fact that CoD made every aspect better, then a play-through is worth it.