You are Lieutenant Jimmy Patterson, a lowly transport corp pilot who was a mere semester away from graduating with a degree in aerospace engineering (with a 4.0 GPA, no less) before you enlisted. During training, you got the highest possible marks in every category, including weaponry, leadership, and marksmanship. Last week you single-handedly shot down half a dozen Nazi planes before sneaking back into friendly territory. You make Indiana Jones look like an underachiever in comparison. Now the Office of Strategic Services wants to recruit you.
This is how you are introduced to your character in the opening scenes of the Sony Playstation game Medal of Honor, a collaborative effort between Dreamworks Interactive and Electronic Arts. Set in World War II Nazi Germany, the object of the game is simple - you are to engage in the wholesome American pastime of shooting Nazis in the head. Well, perhaps not that simple. Sometimes you have to go find specific items or, more likely, blow up other specific items, but if you see any Nazis along the way, make sure to shoot them in the head. Don't feel too bad about it, though, because apparently the Nazis were a bunch of bloodless freaks who whimpered and died a very clean, dry death whenever they were wounded. No wonder the rest of the world hated them so much.
Though it minimizes the gore and splatter (if not the violence), Medal of Honor is a fairly typical first-person shooter, distinguishable from the dozens of other FPS games only to the trained eye. The 3D world is not particularly realistic, decent but a tad grainy. The controls are laid out in an intuitive manner, but are not always easy to use, mainly due to problems with the 3D environment. The most annoying problem is with jumping - sometimes you can get yourself stuck mid-air trying to jump on a box or onto a ledge. When running around tight corners, walls have a tendency to randomly disappear and reappear, and you can give yourself vertigo as you spin around trying to figure out where you are. Be wary of random Nazis materializing from thin air - the game refresh rate is a little slow.
Despite its shortcomings, Medal of Honor does have its good points. The music is a fantastic orchestral score. The sound effects enhance the shoddy realism of the graphics: you can hear Nazis shouting to each other (usually about you) and making announcements over loudspeakers. The cut scenes between missions, parodying war-time newsreels and narrated by "General Hargrove," are also worth checking out. Some of them are hilarious - for instance, did you know that your commanding officer was an art history major? The loss of all of those invaluable paintings that the thieving Nazis stole could just make him cry...or shoot them in the head.
In the interest of variety, on a few missions you go undercover as a German officer. You must complete your objectives while foiling the Nazis with stolen identification. This is fun, but only has a tenuous grasp on reality. After all, the Nazi enemies in the game will remember you (and attack you, even half an hour later) if you so much as flash a gun in front of them, but you can approach a Nazi guard with one ID, when he refuses it, go shoot a higher-ranking officer and steal his ID, come back to the first guard and he lets you through. ("Umm, yes. 30 seconds ago I was someone else, now I'm this guy. Please let me pass.") It should also be noted that although you're supposed to maintain your cover in the spy levels, you still have to kill all of the Nazis on each level to get the "excellent" rating necessary to unlock special game codes, even though doing so will almost certainly blow your cover.
In addition to the single player missions, Medal of Honor offers a multiplayer mode, which leaves much to be desired. There are no computer-controlled enemies in multiplayer, just you and the other player, so unless one or both of you is very, very bad, it quickly degenerates into a game of tag. The only boon is that character selection in multiplayer mode is much more varied (single player mode can only be played with Jimmy). You can play Manon, the saucy French spy, several different Nazi officers, or, if you unlock all of the secret codes in single player mode, you can be Winston Churchill or Rosie the Riveter. Aside from the novelty of witnessing Churchill pumping bullets into Rosie's gut, multiplayer isn't worth it.
Medal of Honor is not particularly unique. It is however, an enjoyable way to waste an afternoon. Keep in mind, though, that replay value is limited, as mindlessly blasting your way through endless Nazi cannon fodder can become a bit tiresome after a while.