In
Medal of Honor: Vanguard, you'll play as Corporal Frank Keegan, a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division. You'll be dropped behind enemy lines numerous times and have to fight your way to victory, sometimes by yourself, but usually with your team. Missions range from securing areas, defending and destroying bridges, ridding an area of snipers, and so on. You'll begin with one or two guns, but you have the option to drop an existing weapon and grab up an enemy's weapon after they have been killed. Personally, I find that as long as I have a rifle with a decent scope, I am fine. You'll have to test out numerous weapons to find out what you are most comfortable with.
You'll begin by being dumped out of a plane, needing to guide your parachute to the areas indicated by the flares set on the ground. Once you land, you'll generally be bombarded by enemy fire, so it pays to hide out and regroup with your team. You'll begin by picking off the enemy, however your team rarely seems to be much help. It seems that enemies continue to spawn until you move to the area that you need to be in, according to the game's script. If you don't move forward, forget about your team making a move. They will sit and wait on you. So you make your move and then they join you, but there will be many times that they will flat out get in your way. Say you are needed to sweep an area of snipers. Well, one of your guys is going to stand right where you need to be to make the first kill, poking his head around the corner to check things out - as if he is going to do something about it. So you have to go out in the open to make the shot. Argh! Alas, there is no friendly fire, so I couldn't even gain any satisfaction by shooting them in the ass. However, I will say that the A.I. is not terrible throughout the game. It's bad in the beginning, then gets better, then gets annoying again towards the end.
While I can't say that the missions are widely varied, they are fun, for the most part. While Starscream (who is reviewing the Wii version of MOH: Vanguard) had no love whatsoever for this title, I actually really enjoyed it. My only major gripe (aside from the sometimes stupid A.I. and unavoidable cut scenes) is the insane length between some checkpoints. For instance, there's a mission towards the end where you must clear out a factory. You go in and are ambushed, then right after, there's a save point. It takes you maybe 5 minutes (and that's quite a stretch) to get here. Then, there's not another checkpoint for a little while - not until you get past a tank and delve deeper into the factory. But that's not the worst part. Eventually, you work your way to the above mentioned sniper clean-out. Now this is an insanely tough area that is very long. You have to go so far before you get a checkpoint that I have turned the machine off in frustration several times. I just think the checkpoints should have been a little bit more forgiving and occurred a tad more often.
There's also a multiplayer aspect to Vanguard, but it's not all that much fun. You can battle it out with up to three other players, selecting whether to be on the Allies' side or the Axis'. Then you can select a skin. Your weapons are assigned to you based on your choices. You can play in King of the Hill, Capture the Flag, Deathmatch or Scavenger Hunt. All are fairly self-explanatory. If you are just playing one other person, it's kind of boring since it's just you and them, running around killing each other and stealing things back, etc. Medal of Honor is, once again, all about the single player experience.
