The base game of Medal of Honor: Allied Assault is considered a classic and not without reason. It was the first MoH game on PC and also the first big budget PC FPS about WWII that tried to show war in a realistic setting but also with a lot of influence from Hollywood.

Allied Assault had very memorable set pieces that had the main character, a member of the OSS mostly do all the busy work by himself. Sure, in the Normandy level, perhaps the most memorable one, you're not alone but for the majority of the game you're a one-man-army: infiltrating a German sub base while wearing a disguise, sneaking through a cute snowy western-european town with unsuspecting enemies or clearing a city littered with deadly snipers.

Spearhead is the first expansion pack for MoH:AA and it attempts to put you in the shoes of a grunt: you're almost always surrounded with friendlies. Not only does it change the feel of the game, the developers have adjusted the enemy AI to not exclusively attackt he player which happens very often in games with friendly NPCs. You can actually keep your distance and let your comrades draw the fire while you're carefully picking the enemies off one by one.

The missions themselves have accordingly become less "glamorous". Instead of playing dress up with the German uniform you're now tasked with holding the line while the enemies are attacking, destroying AA guns or clearing out buildings in a half-destroyed city. And all that with the support of friendlies. Sometimes a medic is accompanying you and your squad to heal anyone injured. The expansion is far easier due to that, but it's a welcome change because the original is pretty tough.

The shooting is taken directly from the original and I like it a lot, it's punchy, enemies react to every hit and cry out when killed, and both the enemy and the player have a bit more HP to survive a couple of shots instead of going down almost immediately like in CoD. I enjoy that, feels less twitchy.

However the comparison to CoD is not favourable when the whole expansion is taken into account and not just the shooting. Infinity Ward crammed everything into their game, both boots on the ground regular soldier experience and the secret operations with disguises. They even added a tank mission that is way better than the one in Spearhead. Spearhead has you regrouping with soviet soldiers only to be separated from them for the entire level, whereas CoD has an entire soviet campaign.

The explanation is that Infinity Ward was formed by the exact same people who developed Allied Assault, because they were dissatisfied with their contract with EA. So after making Allied Assault, THE WWII FPS, Zampella and others who left EA were able to easily improve on all the aspects of MoH and deliver the golden goose that still keeps on giving for Activision.

MoH: AA and its first expansion are good games deserving of recognition but the juggernaut that is CoD simply outdid everything MoH achieved in 2002.

In this day and age only the most nerdy or nostalgic will be digging around to find these games but they have their charm and should not be forgotten.