Also available on OSX and Linux Breakthrough is the second of Medal of Honor: Allied Assault's two expansion packs, and this one has you fight against the Italians (and, obviously, some Germans) in North Africa and Sicily. Like Spearhead, being an expansion of Allied Assault, the gameplay is obviously the same, but unlike Spearhead, I wasn't left feeling rather disappointed after finishing Breakthrough. The big way that Breakthrough differs from Spearhead is that this expansion didn't feel rushed at all. The difficulty was MUCH better paced and increased on a reasonable curve instead of looking like a damn mountain range. There weren't any super bullshit tank levels (the couple tank sequences were pretty well done), and there weren't any spots with health raining from the sky juxtaposed against other spots of absolute health droughts. Speaking of difficulty, I found Breakthrough to be an excellent expansion in that - in my opinion, at least - it provided a slightly increased difficulty vs the base Allied Assault campaign. Not brutal or anything, but it definitely gave the feeling of "You've finished Allied Assault? Alright, try this." It was a challenging campaign in parts, and I couldn't always just Leeroy Jenkins shit as I like to do. That all isn't to say that Breakthrough is without its flaws, however. Like Spearhead, it took more finagling to get working properly on a Windows 10 PC than the base game did, and I still noticed slightly more glitches than in the base game. It wasn't severe or anything, and it still seemed improved over Spearhead, but I did have a couple of Nazis walk straight through a stone wall and into the house in which I was taking cover. Another time I saw an ally holding his gun backwards and firing into his chest while hitting the enemy. None of these glitches really broke the game or hindered my experience, but they were a bit jarring at times. While I still think the core game reigns supreme, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault - Breakthrough is everything that an expansion pack should be. It adds a new campaign that is both well made and balanced with few bugs and a fair, reasonable difficulty curve. It expands on the war, telling part of the story of a front that was not only just briefly mentioned in the core game but is also largely ignored by WWII media in general. Given how quickly and relatively easily the Italians were defeated, we rarely pay any attention to that theater of the war, but the men who fought and died against Erwin Rommel's Afrika Corps and Mussolini's forces deserve recognition as well, and it's nice to see an expansion dedicated to those two parts of the conflict. Clearly EA learned something from Spearhead because Breakthrough is a markedly superior effort in pretty much every way. My Rating - A |
I'm a teacher.And I like to play video games. I like to collect video games. I like to talk about video games, and I like to write about video games. During the day, I teach high school history; during the night, I spend my spare time gaming. Then I write about it. Archives
April 2024
|