This is like the child genius that, instead of pursuing the gift, decides that drugs are better. It just seems out of place that EA was willing to spend millions on the game, but didn't give the developers an extra 3-6 months to really balance the game and make it shine. I will reiterate that there are some great moments in MOH: PA. Then why can't I hit people until a trigger is tripped? How can an enemy take five machine gun bullets to the head from under 10 feet away and live? How do these enemies magically appear? Why can't I bring down a scope when reloading (and how am I reloading with the scope up)? Why would enemies in a hut fifty feet away not respond to gunfire that just killed all their comrades? How is it that few of my virtual teammates die, but they can take enough bullets to kill King Kong? And finally, with all the polish put on the production values, how can these things be overlooked? You have to rely on your Corpsman to do this for you (up to four times per level). It takes an excruciatingly long time to reload most weapons, you have to bandage yourself when your hurt, and there are very few 'health packs' laying around. This is where MOH: PA has an identity crisis. There are too many areas where, even with the enemy in plain sight (especially using a sniper rifle), no amount of firepower will down them some unseen script hasn't been triggered yet, and everything is a placeholder until that happens. One very common thing to do in many FPS games is to scout ahead slowly, picking off enemies to make it easier on yourself. Unless the Japanese were on a particularly strong, iron-rich diet, there's no way that it should take so much power to do them in. There are a lot of cheap shots here, and for some reason your weapons are often underpowered. You can hear the 'All clear!' yelp of your team, walk ten feet forward, and suddenly the place is crawling with enemies. While it's okay for enemies to spawn almost at random in some games like Painkiller or Serious Sam, it's completely out of place here. Unfortunately, it's these same sequences that expose the game's shortcomings. To be fair, these jungle sequences are broken up by the occasional vehicle ride (on rails), and look spectacular. Go along and/or near the path, come across Japanese soldiers, kill them, find the village/array of huts, kill everything, set a charge, get (de)briefed, and continue. But after an hour or two of this, the patterns begin to rear their ugly heads. The graphics engine renders everything in startling detail, and the locales seem authentic. Jungle sequences constitute a majority of the game.

Then it's off to the jungles for far, far too long. It's a glorious bit of gameplay, involving varied play styles, interesting timed events, and plenty of eye candy. Manning a gun on a boat, you're shooting down as many Japanese Zeroes as you can, all en route to a sinking ship where you have to rescue what survivors you can while attempting to keep the vessel from capsizing. After a tense run down a pier toward your assigned boat, you participate in one of the best moments in the game. You arrive moments before the attack and sure enough, you're thrust into the thick of it all. As luck would have it, your first assignment after boot camp is Pearl Harbor. From there, you're taken back to your days as a Marine recruit, shortly before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

You're landing on the beaches, about to participate in D-Day, and are quickly knocked out (there's nothing you can do to avoid it). The game starts with a strange flashback. Where the majority of WWII FPS games take place somewhere in the European Theater, MOH:PA sets itself apart by concentrating completely on the other side of the globe. There's fun to be had here, but considering the lineage of the series, this is a little bit of a letdown. The problem, and it's big, is inconsistency in the gameplay: MOH: PA doesn't know if it's an arcade game, a simulation, or something in between. The setting is somewhat uncharted in the first-person shooter (FPS) World War II subgenre.

The music is spot-on, changing moods appropriately to the context of the game. The graphics engine is gorgeous with plenty of cool effects. Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault ( MOH: PA) has a lot going for it. Infinity Ward, the developer of Call of Duty, is mostly comprised of folks that left the Medal of Honor team and unfortunately for EA Games, it shows. Ever since games like Medal of Honor (and more specifically, the Allied Assault sequel) and the superlative Call of Duty were released, games with relatively accurate depictions of World War II have been in vogue.

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