14 DAY TRIAL // Medal of Honor is the new first person shooter from developers Danger Close and DICE and publisher Electronic Arts, taking the player to the battlefields of Afghanistan and putting him in the dessert combat boots of a variety of characters that engage the Taliban after the events of September 11, 2001.
After a brief cinematic section that mentions, pretty obliquely, the events that led to the War on Terror and beginning of operations in Afghanistan, the player is taken inside a truck driving alongside a dusty road somewhere in the country, with another Special Forces operator on the seat next to him and a second truck further down the road.
It's pretty clear that someone high up at Electronic Arts saw and loved the opening scene of the first Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, the one which features a ride through the streets of a city, and decided that the new Medal of Honor, to celebrate its move to the modern day, needs something similar to make an impact.
The big thing that both people from the developer and the publisher failed to notice was the mix of freedom and constraints in Modern Warfare, where the player was free to look around the game world, noticing some pretty traumatic things on the edge of field of view, while dealing with the fact that he was unable to control anything more than his eyes and that the whole ride was clearly heading to a bad ending.
In Medal of Honor the car ride, featuring goats, Chechen fighters and an explosive finish does not allow the player to determine what he is looking at (the goat texture is magnificent) even though he is a Special Forces guy who is in control of his destiny.
The subtext is clear here: you are just a point of view for the developers of Medal of Honor, you lack actual agency and, unfortunately, the rest of the game only emphasizes the feeling established during this first truck ride.