Medal of Honor reviewed on PlayStation 3 by Harry Neary. Game supplied for review by Electronic Arts

If Medal of Honor truly is merely aping its now more successful lovechild Call of Duty then the imitation is not of the more recent chaotic and rather one-note games. In recent years Call of Duty has become a game bereft of dynamics, a full-on eight hour gunfight for the ADHD generation. Instead EA’s new game is a reminder of what Call of Duty (and of course Medal of Honor) used to be - a shooter with one foot in realism, the other in cinema, with changes of pace and mood to keep things fresh.

For me that’s where the single player portion of Medal of Honor succeeds, returning the military shooter to a place that doesn’t feel like one long grind of every bigger explosions in place of a coherent plot. Yet Medal of Honor ultimately isn’t a successful single player game. For all its lofty ambitions in the portrayal of the conflict in Afghanistan the writing comes across as merely passable. References to incompetent leaders and their long-suffering but capable subordinates are well meaning, but are handled with the skill of a trashy airport thriller rather than a searing indictment on western military chauvinism. The result often feels forced and trite, if this was the BBC it would be more Spooks than Edge of Darkness.

That’s not to say there aren’t thrills aplenty along the way. There’s an interesting variety in the action as one switches from the stealthy Tier One units to the more traditional ground pounders. Yet some of the Wolfpack’s sneaking around often appears to be merely padding out an already all-too short single player campaign. Some sections work better than others - the assault on Bagram Airfield early on doesn’t really ring true to how you imagine the real event occurred - it’s like some big daft videogame, like Call of Duty, or worse.

Meanwhile, the later introduction of the regular Army into the conflict - with an ambush and the downing of a Chinook sends shivers down the spine. This has an authenticity that makes Medal of Honor feel like it has something to say that’s worth listening too. If the rest of the campaign was as good as this section - which really should have been moved to open the game - then we’d have a much better and more worthy game on our hands.

The minutia of gameplay, the actual use of guns and combat, is very pleasing. There’s less of the spray and pray approach favoured by chaotic recent Call of Duty games and instead you’ll be involved in long range as well as short range battles. All the weapons are fun, a feeling heightened by the best in class sound effects thundering from the sound system.

The night missions - where different colour tracers light up the battlefield - really are something, atmospheric and thrilling. Some may not like the distance over which some of the gunfights occur but I am not one of those, I think the actual moments of contact work very well. The effect is somewhat ruined by the linearity of the game. Often it will be hard to tell what to do next - because you've failed to reach some invisible trigger, or reached it too early. This is last generation stuff.

The enemy AI is very poor. Their stupidity in the face of danger increased my feeling that I didn’t actually want to kill these guys, that I was fighting a war we had no business being involved in and that calling down 105mm howitzer fire from a circling AC130 gunship might be a technical marvel, but also an act of barbarism. The legions of kids that are going to be playing this game thanks to their feckless parents aren’t going to give a damn, but for those of you with an emotions that run to more than “cool, guns” there are moments that will make you feel you really aren’t on the side of the angels here. You owe it to the Taliban and the AQ to play this game on hard, at least give them a fighting chance.

I’ve already explained that the campaign doesn’t hang together particularly well thanks to a wide variation in quality in the missions and the writing. The same could be said regarding the game technical aspects. EA sent over the PlayStation 3 version for us to review and my hope (for those of you picking the game up on X360 and PC) it isn’t completely representative. Texture quality on the whole is rather poor. Worse even in sections filled with seemingly well designed scenery the objects don’t feel like they share the same space - there’s a lack of coherence that may just be down to whatever anti-aliasing method isn’t really doing its job. Don’t expect Battlefield Bad Company 2 visuals here - that game looked amazing on the PS3 - here we’re left with a game that can look good (the marine landing I mentioned earlier for example), with some excellent lighting at times, but which overall doesn’t really cut the mustard in graphical terms.

There are some odd UI choices too. I know this is a particularly personal view - but the colour your reticule turns when pointing at a friendly was always a nasty shade of blue when Internet Explorer 5 used it for links, I didn’t really want to see it again. I guess this could be easily fixed and changed to a less glaring shade of green.

The soundtrack though is fantastics. I’m not talking about the acting - that’s as good as you can manage given some of the terrible well-meaning dialogue forced upon the cast - the actual sound effects in battle, the gunfire, the explosions. Through a surround system it sounds immense. This was always one of the highlights of a Medal of Honor game - all the way back to the very first game on the original PlayStation - and its nice to see aural qualitty still being prioritised. I expect the game will win awards for the soundscape.

So, where does this all leave us? As a single player game Medal of Honor is worth playing. The gunfights are actually pretty good once you’ve ramped up the AI. But the pacing and design of the missions themselves are hit and miss, when they work they work very well, when they don’t you’ll be wondering why on earth you’re driving around Afghanistan in the middle of the night on a quad bike. Truth be told Medal of Honor feels like it had another month or so of polishing to complete before EA has kicked it out of the door, you don’t expect to get stuck on scenery items and have to reload a checkpoint these days. But it’s happened enough on both my playthroughs of the campaign.

If your purchase decision is mostly about the multiplayer game then you’ll be happier, it’s much stronger than the short single player campaign. I’ve avoided going into detail about that section as I’ll be reviewing that separately once I’ve had more real world experience rather than pre-release nonsense with other games writers.

I enjoyed Medal of Honor’s campaign more than I didn’t enjoy it, but given all the controversy surrounding this game I expected a lot more, both in narrative and level design. Medal of Honor is different enough that it offers a genuine alternative to the forthcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops, but lacks polish and focus. Tackling the controversial subject of an ongoing war requires something special and alas MoH’s single player campaign doesn’t have that. Critics of the videogames industry aren't really going to find anything shocking here to fuel their idiotic reactionary campaigns, but neither is the industry any closer to showing it has the vocabulary with which to comment on such important world events. Instead it's a mostly fun shooter, with some shoddy graphics, that may as well have been set in Spurlackistan.

Medal of Honor - rated 18 by the BBFC - will be released on Friday 15th October on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC and is available from Amazon.