Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault is a fierce "firefight" in itself.
User Rating: 8.8 | Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault PC
When Medal of Honor: Allied Assault was the first installment for the PC Medal of Honor series. It was one of those games that was incredible addicting, great graphics, and superb sound. After 2 expansion packs were released in the earlier years, Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault arrived with a blast. Pacific Assault is a game that drives you directily into the core action gameplay. The story is heart-warming and very nice to watch. As more as you progress through the game, your actions affect your story. As soon as you start the game, you are in a landing craft and about to invade a Japanese beach. Before this happens, though, there is a short little cintematic that begins the great story. Once you land on the deadly beach, you and some allied soldiers are confronted by hordes of Japanese soldiers. The heavy fire from the enemies forces you and some soldiers to take cover under a bridge. As soon as you are under the bridge, a gernade is thrown at you and explodes, which causes you to "relive" your boot-camp training. Obviously, this is the tutorial in which you meet your actual squad members throughout the game. After the tutorial, you finally wake up and then move onto the next mission. The fast-paced gameplay is very intense and makes you want to take cover all through the game. The Japanese enemies that you will be facing are tough-neck soldiers and show no mercy at all. Infact, once you manage to swift through the bullets and get next to the Japanese soldiers, you will be either swarmed by bonzai charges and strong bashes. The Japanese soldiers will gut you with their bayonet until you are down and out on the floor. Once you get onto the floor and are waiting for assistance by a medic, you are watching the world go by you as the mortars splash the ground with intense heat blasts. If the medic doesn't get to you first, the enemy will. Once an enemy notices that you are lying on the ground, he will use his weapon and either shoot you or stab you to assure your death. The core gameplay itself is so much fun and is one of the highlights of this great game. One of the major issues with the game is that Pacific Assault does not run all smoothly thoughout the game, even with a fast computer. There is major lag on the multiplayer servers that makes multiplayer games very tough to play. The loading times aren't that bad, but that doesn't make up for the large lag. Although the game isn't always as you expect it to be, it gets really fun when there are crazy firefights. It seems as though you are outnumbered by hundreds of soldiers on the battlefields, because literally, it's basically you and around 3 to 4 guys against many soldiers. And these soldiers are not simple easy to kill, their AI is on an amazing level and have deadly accurate aim. Even on the easy mode, it is very hard to eleminate your opponents. There are a couple occasions where you are with around lots of allied soldiers and have to clear an area. These parts are the best parts in the game. It gets really fun here, because there is just bullets whizzing across you at nearly all times in these firefights. The graphics in Pacific Assault use a new graphics engine that other previous installments of Medal of Honor on the PC. The graphics are crisp and very nice looking, but it's not always remarkable. The best detail is probaly when looking upclose on soldiers' faces. Their faces have a large amount of color and texture. The bushes and trees is a little nitch that is really keeping the grahpics from standing out to where it could be. They look very "untextured" but suit well to the jungle environment that you will almost always be seeing. Land, sea, and air veichles have a nice feel to it and are very well done. If you look at the sea during naval battles, the sea looks absoloutely stunning. From the shadows of naval aircrafts to the slight "marking" of ships on the sea, it just looks very nice. The lighting effects are very great looking and doesn't need any work at all. You'd just wish that everything looks as fascinating as the sea and soldiers' faces. Even though everything is not as colorful as you'd hope, the grahpics still proive a great look to the game. Especially during huge battles, the grahpics are really shown out to it's best. The mortar explosions look intense, aircraft weapons and bullets look stunning, and it justs looks "cool" during battles. The sound is probaly the greatest thing about Pacific Assault. If you played Allied Assault, then you understand what i'm talking about. Allied Assault has sounds exactly like the critically acclaimed gory movie, "Saving Private Ryan." Pacific Assault is almost no different. The music is almost as good as the Saving Private Ryan soundtrack, itself. The real show of the sound is during combat. The sounds of the rattling weapons and bullets are the sharpest i've ever heard. They weapons do not sound over-powered or under-powered and have the right feel to it. For instance, certain powerful maching guns have a piercing sound but is not louder than weapons like MG-42s. The rattling of the crazy gunfire is so intense that you may want to get the best speakers to get even a slightly "better" sound that what it already is. The value of Pacific Assault is quite impressive. Since actions slightly effect the story, you may want to re-try levels and do certain tasks that will either improve or lower your overall "score." You are earned things like medals and have a "history" book where all your shots that you fired, locations of shots, and things like that are stored into this book. Although the multiplayer has the bad lag, it is still pretty fun. The highest difficultly levels are extremely tough and should be tried to those who are real veterans of the game. It is so hard that even the best of players will most likely have a very hard time completely even one or two levels. Overall, Medal of Honor Pacific Assault is a unique game with a unique stlye that should greatly be appreciated. This game is approachable to people who like to play shooters on the PC. I also highly reccomend Pacific Assault to those who have played Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and Call of Duty. Pacific Assault is done with great achievement and is one of the better World War II themed shooters out there. To sum everything all up, Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault is an intense "fierce" in itself. 
