Review

As you can see from the score, MoHAA is an extremely well produced game, one of the most professionally produced games I've played. And while I've got some negative things to say below, don't let that cloud the fact that MoHAA is justifiably the new standard bearer for single-player shooters of its ilk. The designers committed themselves to a particular game design philosophy, and they obviously believed in it and stuck to it, which makes for a cohesively entertaining experience. I rarely take issue with a game that knows what it is and is what it is without apologies. MoHAA is such a game, and the design philosophy that I'm talking about is an unwavering focus on delivering very carefully and tightly controlled experiences for the player; sacrificing player freedom in order to better manipulate pacing, immersion, tension, and action. For instance, there are several occasions where the player is pushed through to an objective by infinitely spawning nazis, and it didn't bother me. A similar scenario in Undying made me quit the game in disgust. What was the difference? Consistency. Undying had betrayed its own willfully developed sense of player freedom. MoHAA instead was simply leveraging the spawning nazis as just another progression mechanic in an unending stream of progression mechanics.

At any rate, my point is that MoHAA isn't necessarily everyone's idea of a great single-player game. But it is exactly what it set out to be, and fabulously so. It doesn't masquerade as anything else to try to trick you into playing it. If you don't like heavily-scripted shooters on rails, don't play it. Go play a sandbox FPS like Thief or Deus Ex, and have a good time. I'll be right there with you.

Good

• I'm reminded of the scene in Braveheart where the character of Stephen is introduced, and he says, "If I join you do I get to kill the English?" The question is, if you play MoHAA, do you get to kill the nazis? Yes. The answer is yes, unquestionably yes. There is no shortage of things to shoot at in this game. Targets are not meted out miserly, like they were in RTCW. And don't worry about ammo, there's plenty. Conservation is not what this game is about. It's not over the top in a Serious Sam kind of way, but the plethora of enemies is one of the main reasons why you'll finish this game before you know what hit you.

• I guess I already mentioned it in the intro above: consistency. With the exception of a few gameplay flaws (see below) MoHAA never jeopardizes its recipe for fun. So once you know what kind of game you're in, if you decide to stay, it will deliver.

Bad

• You can't lean. I understand that in a single-player game, the ability to lean and peak around corners can potentially allow a player to severely exploit the AI and make a mockery of the gameplay. RTCW solved this by allowing you to lean, but preventing you from shooting while leaned. That's fine. A compromise. Other games, like Ghost Recon, manage just splendidly allowing you to both lean *AND* shoot! MoHAA desperately needs leaning to allow you to survive the completely inhuman sniping skills of the AI.

• Speaking of inhuman sniping skills... several levels in the game were rendered almost totally unfun because of the game's inability to adequately communicate what direction a shot came from. It's one thing to have to stick your ass out in the wind to find out where a sniper is, just because the game doesn't let you peak around corners, but it's altogether unforgivable for the game to then tag the player in said ass and not help them determine where the shot came from. When you get hit, the compass in the top left corner of the HUD will flash briefly in the quadrant where the shot came from. I'm sorry, but that's bad UI. The reason it's bad is because it forces me to do one of two things: actually look at my surroundings when I stick my ass out in the wind, or just stick my ass out blindly and focus on the compass, waiting for the inevitable, brief, red flash so that I at least have something to show for my trouble.

Ugly

• No blood. I said it in my RTCW review and I'll say it here: take away the blood and you take away the immersion. I don't care how good your textures are, or how spot-on the audio is for your thompson machine gun, or how fantastic a job your animators did creating bullet-impact animations. When you shoot people, they bleed. It's that simple. Thank god for the mod community. Don't play this game without a decent blood patch (see the files section).

• 2015 ruined what could have been two of the finest experiences in gaming: landing on Omaha beach, and traversing a French town full of snipers in a thunderstorm. Let's take these one at a time (though they're ruined for essentially identical reasons). First, the Normandy landing is awesome (it ought to be, since the framerate tanks nearly into the single digits). All of the ingredients are there - the grey, choppy waters of the Atlantic, a boat-full of my comrades, explosions, sand flying in my face, bullets tearing into the surf. And then there's that extra special ingredient, the one I'm sure the designers like to call "challenge": frequent, unavoidable, death. What starts out as one of the most immersive scenes ever turns quickly into an exercise in futility and repeated failure. The first half dozen times you die, the scene manages to retain some of its immersion, but the last dozen or so times, basically you just want to trigger the objective so you can get on with the goddamn game. Way to ruin D-Day guys. As for the sniper level (Sniper's Last Stand), it too starts off with the promise of an incredibly immersive experience. The rain is heavy and unabating. Ruined buildings threaten death from any angle as you inch forward. And they make good on the threat, as you get sniped repeatedly by nazi sharp-shooters that you can neither see nor find. When a game forces you to quicksave, and then stand up and wander into the open so that you can take multiple shots in the chest in order to ascertain the whereabouts of a sniper, it has failed miserably in its goal of being entertaining. The problem is that the opposing snipers must have super Predator vision because they shoot you immediately. They shoot you from 100yds away as soon as you poke your little head out. They shoot you through several layers of thick foliage - foliage that *you* can't even see through. Their uber skills are exacerbated by two factors: the aforementioned inability to lean, and the aforementioned hit-indicator flaw in the UI. Fix these two things, and I'll be more than happy to take my chances against the super nazi Predator snipers. I wasn't trying to John Wayne my way through the town, I quite happily dialed my pace down to a crawl and was doing my best to play the role of a WWII soldier protecting his own hide as best he could. The game literally forced me to abandon that role and adopt instead that of target dummy.

Beautiful

• The pacing in the game is sublime. You may not really be doing all that much as a player, but the ride sure is fun. I was finished with this game before I even knew what happened, and that's not a complaint about the length of the campaign (which some have criticized) but a rather a testament to how easily this game pulls you effortlessly from one tautly constructed encounter to the next.

• The game uses your own custom key mappings when it displays interface hints. This is one of my pet peeves - it's not difficult to do, and I chalk it up to laziness whenever a game developer is content to let the so-called "help" display totally useless default key mappings. So kudos to 2015 for bothering to make help that's actually helpful. And shame on everyone else.

Summary

Is MoHAA fun? As always, that depends on you. I would be surprised if someone who likes shooters sat down in front of MoHAA and didn't immediately lose 3 hours. That's how playable the game is. Nevertheless, that doesn't necessarily make it a great game. As polished as it is, the strongest impression that it made on me is that of a theme park ride. You don't have to do much but sit back and enjoy it. It's like your favorite candy bar. What's not to like? It's just not a meal. And I don't pretend that this impression isn't totally dictated by my own gaming predilections. I value player freedom and long-term replayability more than I do gorgeous graphics and tight-as-a-drum scripting, though I certainly recognize the top-tier qualities of MoHAA and respect its place in the spectrum of gaming.