4/5 ★ – WrathofBen's review of Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond.

This is going to be a bittersweet review, because this is (so far) the last Medal of Honor game to be made, as well as my last one left to play in the series. And this game was made by Respawn, one of my favorite modern developers! I love Titanfall/Apex, and the Jedi games, so I was really excited for this one. This game took me a long time to get through, solely because VR titles kind of require a lot of commitment. You have to have a decent amount of space, a solid chunk of time, the energy, and for me, a stable internet connection to Air Link to a PC. Yes, you can purchase the game on the Meta Quest store, but my Quest storage is full and the game was on sale on Steam. I was able to play this game with Air Link for the first half until I moved homes and had less stable internet. Then I had to whip out the Oculus Link cable. I've never played VR wired, so this was really strange. But it did beat lagging all over the place. So, this review is literally months in the making, marking one of my longest playthroughs for a game. But every time I strapped on my Quest 2 to play this game, I had an absolute blast. This game just FEELS like the PS1/PS2 MoH games, with more precise aiming and shooting controls. The lighthearted nature of the characters mixed with a dark tone of war feels perfect, aside from some of the jankiest and hilarious cutscenes I've ever seen. I love this game. And I'm about to tell you why. You play as a nameless character working with various individuals in the OSS. The game opens with you working with a kid named Ollie and an old Sargent going by the nickname 'Sarge'. Along the way, you run into Manon from the previous games, as well as her sister and other French Resistance collogues. While Jimmy Patterson isn't seen in this game, he IS mentioned as your pilot for the second to last mission, which I thought was a nice touch. You work your way through aided the French Resistance, leading a platoon of troops through Normandy, sabotaging U-Boats, preventing Nazi nuclear research, and destroying a V2 rocket facility. Lots of familiar ground from previous games, but they are very engaging missions (aside from the U-Boat mission... I'll get to that later). The characters all feel so fleshed out, with huge personalities. I really enjoyed all of them, as well as their vocal performances. Sarge is a highlight character here. He is such a funny, but bull true companion. I was always sad when he would be absent from missions. The only thing is that the cutscenes are horrendous because they have to be in VR. You always fade in from black to a group of people waiting around and staring at you for sometimes up to 10 seconds before dialogue starts. It's like the game is waiting for you to pay attention, which is super weird. It's always jarring, and always funny. Totally breaks the immersion that this game otherwise does really well with. Gameplay is phenomenal here. You can carry a main weapon on either shoulder, a sidearm on your hip, and a grenade on your chest. Each hand lets you grab a new weapon to swap from that shoulder. Other than snipers, all of the guns felt perfect to use. I found myself using every weapon possible, the sandbox was that great! Snipers are okay, the scope effect was just really disorienting. It blacks out the entire screen and looks like a screen recording of a scope, making it awkward to look through. If the gun is anywhere near your eye, you cannot see. That being said, each sniper felt impactful, and sniping was extremely satisfying. To reload any weapon or throw any grenade, you have to eject the magazine, grab ammo from your hip, cock the gun, pull the pin on grenades, and throw them. Pretty much any motion you'd have to do in real life, you have to do here. It all feels so great... until it doesn't. Yeah, there are some things that just don't work right. I already mentioned snipers, but skiing and swimming sections were honestly pretty abysmal, with turret sections being only slightly better. Mission 4 drove me insane because the swimming was so awkward, and the level BROKE! I had to swim into a tiny hatch, but my character kept getting stuck. So, I was physically swimming like an idiot for 15 minutes before just reloading the mission. When you are the controller, and YOU aren't working properly, it's so annoying. Otherwise, every mission felt varied from one another and was very fun to explore. There are so many areas you can just run around and grab stuff on tables, including collectibles. I honestly spent half the time in this game just looking around in the incredibly detailed environments. Aside from the campaign, there is multiplayer, survival and the gallery. I was unfortunately too late to play the multiplayer by a few months, because EA shut the servers down. What I saw from videos online looked fun though! Survival takes you to iconic segments from the campaign and starts you with a pistol and tests your abilities, as well as allows you to complete hidden objectives. This is a game mode I didn't spend too long on but could see myself coming back to later. The Gallery probably has the most value in this game because it is a series of interviews and mini-documentaries of real WWII veterans, and their stories. The developers even got to show some veterans environments they created in VR to take them back to their time in Europe (That sounds bad on paper, but it is really sweet to watch this, because that war was such a prominent moment in their life, and they respond to this with pride). Apparently the first game on the PS1 had a gallery, but I'm not sure I remember this. This gallery alone shows the pure love that was poured into this game. And that is what brings me to such a sad feeling. This game had SO much love and creativity. Respawn really wanted to reboot this game back to its former glory, and recapture that feeling of the original games. And they did this near perfectly! But no one played it... Because it was locked to VR. The story I've heard is that Meta/Oculus convinced Respawn to morph this game into a VR title, even though Above and Beyond was being made as a standard FPS game for Xbox, PC, and PlayStation. This decision is no doubt what killed any chance of this series picking up steam ever again. The player base for VR, (especially in 2020) was WAY smaller than the big three platforms of the time. And there weren't that many full-length video games for VR yet. That is a problem when you are trying to reboot a big franchise like Medal of Honor. So, of course, this game flopped HARD, and the franchise is back on ice. Medal of Honor had a small moment of life, only for its heartbeat to quickly die out again. This breaks my heart, because the game is so inspired and filled with love. Respawn poured so much into this game, with so many people being involved. There was even an Academy Award Winning documentary made in partnership with the game that is INCREDIBLE! Respawn even brought back original series composer Michael Giacchino to compose the theme for Above and Beyond, with Nami Melumad handling the rest of the score. The music and art style are just so stinking good here! The game FEELS great, it LOOKS great, and it SOUNDS great. It just launched on such a limiting platform, no one ever played it. Medal of Honor died for the third and maybe final time. It deserves better. I love this game. I wanted it to be more well known, but it just failed to catch any traction. Which is a shame, because the documentaries bring so much to this experience. The game feels like classic MoH, with modern touches. Seriously, the combat is so engaging. You can even wear helmets that enemies drop when you kill them. Heck, there's even a section you have to make noise to attract a torpedo, and you can use a saxophone to attract it! Like, come on, this game is OOZING with personality. Even though this game has awkward cutscenes and troublesome controls occasionally, I would recommend it this to ANYONE! I just want Medal of Honor back so bad... Maybe Respawn can make another title on all platforms, or remake the PS1 games, or SOMETHING! I really hope EA doesn't let this die again. 8/10, one of the best VR experiences I've ever had.