Airborne! Jump from planes into the battlefields of World War II. Land in strategic positions, kick an unsuspecting enemy and make your way through the mission objectives.

Release Date

September 2007.

Pros

The first-person view and head movement is very nice. Although not as good as Chronicles of Riddick in general, the jumping out of an aeroplane sequence does look fantastic.

Graphics have improved since Pacific Assault and look excellent. Things I noticed most are very good soldier animations, helmets flying off on certain head shots and taking time to focus when looking through the sniper rifle scope.

The sounds and speech are great.

The music is good although I think it was a step down from Pacific Assault and MOHAA.

Unlike the previous Medal of Honor games, Airborne flows in a semi-open/semi-linear fashion. At the beginning of each mission, there are several objectives that can be completed in any order. You can land any where your chute will take you and complete the objectives in any order. Although no where near the size of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., the map is open. After completing the open section, the game then opens up the linear part of the mission which is more like MOHAA and Pacific Assault.

The AI is very well done and varied. There are green opponents that cannot aim and tend to stand out in the open and there are the veterans that are crack shots and try to ambush you. Th AI for your team mates are also well done. Just like Pacific Assault your teams mates do help, but they do not do all the work for you. I would say the AI is as good as S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat and SWAT 4.

There were a few people that still play Medal of Honor Airborne online and I managed to play quite a few games. Even with my ping time of 100-120ms I could play properly. I found that the multiplayer game moves faster than good old MOHAA, but it was very good fun.

Cons

In MOHAA, you could drive tanks and fire the AAA. In Pacific Assault you can fly a plane, fire the AAA and there is some on-rails shooting. Airborne is missing all these vehicles and on-rails shooting. Although the whole first-person experience has been enhanced from the previous games, I felt that some variety has been lost with the exclusion of vehicles and on-rails shooting.

Also missing from Airborne is the high quality tutorial in the previous games. Medal of Honor veterans will not miss this, but new fps players would have a harder time learning up Airborne. There is a small tutorial teaching about jumping out of the aeroplane, but there was not much there either.

LAN multiplayer is missing! I did not realise it at first, because I have been playing online. Then I was going to test something and wanted to start a LAN game and realised there is no such option.

Other Points

The health system is not as realistic as Pacific Assault. There are four bars and if you are injured only part of a bar, it will heal back if you give it time. If a complete bar has been depleted, then the good old health pack has to be found to heal it back.

Another departure from realism is the on-the-fly weapon upgrades during the single player campaign. As you gain experience using a weapon, you get awarded weapon upgrades on the spot. These upgrades include stuff like more ammo, better accuracy and adjustable scopes, and they stay with you for the rest of your single player time. If you replay a completed mission, these upgrades will make your replay easier.

Although not as realistic as Pacific Assault, Airborne is still very difficult on the expert difficulty setting and the game is still good fun to play.

In the game you are a character with a name, but the narrative is nothing like Pacific Assault. Instead it returns to the MOHAA formula of, here’s the mission, go get them.

There are four training videos which provide tips on how to play the game. They are no substitute for a good tutorial, but it is better than nothing.

There are some bonus videos that need to be unlocked to be viewed. They are not as good as the videos in Pacific Assault, but it is better than nothing (again).

Biases

Reviewed version 1.3 of the game.

I really liked MOHAA and Medal of Honor Pacific Assault.

I also really liked The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series and SWAT 4.

I have completed the single player campaign on expert difficulty and played some online multiplayer games.

DRM

Uses SecuROM

A serial code must be entered when installing the game.

The Disc must be in the drive to play the game.

Patches

moha_Update1_2 – Updates the game from 1.0 to 1.2.

medal_of_honor_airborne_update_1.3 – Updates the game from 1.2 to 1.3. You must first have Patch 1.2 installed.

Minimum Requirements (as stated in the readme)

OS: Windows XP (SP2), Windows Vista (32-bit; 64-bit versions of Windows Vista are not supported)
CPU (Single Core): Intel P4 2.8 GHz or AMD Athlon 2800+ for Windows XP / Intel P4 3.0 GHz or AMD Athlon 3800+ for Windows Vista
RAM: 1 GB for Windows XP / 1 GB for Windows Vista
Disk Drive: 8X or faster DVD-ROM drive
Hard Drive: 9 GB or more of free space
Note: 64 bit versions of Windows are not supported
Video: DirectX 9.0c, NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT, ATI Radeon X1300 Pro, or better with Shader 3.0 support for Windows XP or Vista (Note: NVIDIA 6800XT, 6800LE, 7100GS, 7200GS, 7200LE, 7300GS, 7300GT cards not supported). NOTE: NVIDIA SLI and ATI Crossfire modes are not supported in Medal of Honor Airborne.
Sound: DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card (Note: For Creative Sound Blaster Audigy cards running under Windows Vista you should expect lower performance)
Multiplayer: 2 to 12 players, Internet connection required (Cable, DSL, or faster connection)

Computer Played On

Windows 7 64 bit.
Intel Core i5 2.3GHz
4GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GT 525M 1GB RAM
Conexant SmartAudio with egg speakers or earphones.
Graphics settings are set to whatever I feel comfortable with playing on this PC. They are usually not set to the highest settings. All screenshots are taken with my settings.

Handy Tips

Medal of Honor Airborne had some issues with my PhysX driver. After reading this Windows forum thread and the MOHAirborne Steam forum thread, I did the following to get it working.

- I had to uninstall PhysX before trying to install MOHAirborne. The game plainly refuses to install if PhysX is found.
- I had to use regedit to manually remove all PhysX entries from the registry. This is a risky step, but it had to be done to get MOHAirborne working.
- Then I installed Medal of Honor Airborne. The game refused to start even though AGEIA PhysX was installed when the game was installed.
- So, I uninstalled AGEIA PhysX.
- I downloaded the NVIDIA PhysX Legacy System Software and installed it.
- Medal of Honor Airborne would now start and work normally. I have not checked whether uninstalling the PhysX driver has impacted my other games, but for now I will stick to playing MOHAirborne.

To skip the EA Logo intro, go to the <MOHAirborneInstallFolder>\UnrealEngine3\MOHAGame\CookedMovies folder and rename or delete the file named MOHA_Shell_EAID.vp6. Found this out from PCGamingWiki.