Medal of Honor: Underground (GBA)

Medal of Honor: Underground
A great game has been butchered into a bizarre-looking port for the Game Boy Advance.
Genre(s): First-Person Shooter Platform(s): Game Boy Advance Release Date: NA: December 2, 2002 EU: May 9, 2003 Developer(s): Rebellion Developments Publisher(s): NA: Destination Software EU: Zoo Digital Publishing Country: United Kingdom Series: Medal of Honor Predecessor: Medal of Honor (1999) Successor: Medal of Honor: Infiltrator

Medal of Honor: Underground is a WWII-themed first-person shooter video game developed by DreamWorks Interactive and published by Electronic Arts for the PlayStation in 2000.

This page will cover the Game Boy Advance version, which was developed by Rebellion Developments (otherwise known for developing the Aliens vs. Predator and Sniper Elite games) and published by Destination Software in North America, and Zoo Digital Publishing in Europe.

Plot

The game is centered around Manon Batiste, a supporting character from the first game who is a French Resistance fighter turned OSS agent.

Why It Won't Get A Medal Of Honor

1. Ear-bleedingly terrible music that sounds more like an orchestra of farts, and it just gets worse while you advance through the game. Also, most of the songs are reused in some of the later levels.
2. The graphics are so terrible that you might think that you're playing a 3D ZX Spectrum game. All of the sprites are incredibly pixelated, the enemy sprites look even worse than the Game Boy Advance version of Wolfenstein 3D, because some of the enemy sprites don't even seem to use more than five pixels at distance.
3. Draw distance that is so terrible that you can actually see the enemies through walls and floors.
4. Navigating through the maps is a painful task because the controls are very sluggish and imprecise to the point that sometimes they don't even respond at time. It's worth to mention that, because of the limited amount of buttons of the GBA, the "use" button is the same as the shooting button, meaning that when you try to open a door, you can accidentally shoot and lose ammo.
5. Very poor collision detection, you can get stuck if you walk next to a wall.
6. Enemies take a lot of hits to die.
7. The missions from the PS1 version were severely stripped down; for instance, you will not encounter a single enemy vehicle such as tanks or halftracks like you do in the PS1 version.
8. Mission briefings do no longer use FMV or narrations; instead, they use still images and captions.
9. Unlike the original game, here you only have the ridiculous amount of six weapons: the pistol, the sten smg, the shotgun, the grenade, the petrol bomb and the camera (Although this is not exactly a weapon), and all of them are broken or inefficient at best:
   • For some strange reason the pistol sound will change after the second level.
   • The sten smg will shoot random bursts instead of shooting automatically, mostly bursts of four or even six bullets.
   • The shotgun has an abysmal rate of fire, it takes two and a half seconds to load another single round.
10. The game has an auto-aim feature, and while this sounds great taking in count the previous points, it's almost useless because it's prone to fail a lot. It will often aim at places where there are no enemies or where they are taking cover.
11. Incredibly slow framerate, the game seems to run at less than 15 frames per second.
12. Health meter is very confusing, when you get hit, instead of emptying, the colors will change or become darker, but it's hard to know how much health you have left, as these colors don't seem very different from the original ones.
13. A great amount of bugs and glitches, for example, the thirteenth level has an invisible weapon that can't be reloaded with any kind of ammo, and not only that, the game is so poorly programmed that enemies will still shoot you when you're dead.
14. Expert difficulty is incredibly cheap because the enemies will drain your health really fast, and taking in count that the controls are very imprecise and the auto-aim is prone to fail, beating the game in this difficulty can be frustrating or completely impossible.
15. Awful sound design.
16. The last level doesn't even resemble a 1940 era train station, it looks more like a modern subway station, making it look out of place.

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