Medal of Honor games started out strong on the original Playstation but slowly faded to obscurity midway through the PS2’s lifespan. I loved some of the earlier titles but seeing as the latest in the series was pretty bad I wasn’t very excited going in to Medal of Honor: Heroes. That being said, if you go in with no expectations and you’re really hungering for a PSP portable FPS then Heroes might just be the fix you need.


Heroes tells the story of three war veterans who have appeared in some of the previous Medal of Honor games. Each one has five missions in total which only last around a half hour at most. For some reason the developers have seen fit to trim down mission length to such extremes that you’ll wonder if they can really technically call them missions. Maybe this was because the game is portable but it really made me dislike the overall structure of the game.



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When you think Medal of Honor you probably think cinematic WWII and while you will get quite a bit of that, Heroes lacks the series’ usual polish. You don’t at all get emotionally involved in the back-stories of the men you play as and objectives in the game have been pushed into such small packages that you’ll feel almost rushed. Add in the fact that you don’t have two analog sticks and not only does the pacing throw you out of the action mentally but the controls do as well. That’s not to say it’s one of the best controlling FPSs to ever hit a portable game machine, but it’s still pretty far from a keyboard and mouse or a dual analog controller.

So if you can get past all that you’ll actually have quite a bit of fun traversing battles that haven’t been featured in a WWII FPS to date. When making your way through all the missions you’ll notice the general MOH feel in level design which is both a good thing and bad thing. You pretty much kill Nazis, pick up items, and find the end point of the level and then rinse and repeat. It’s extremely linear and adds next to nothing to the genre. The actual modeling of the levels also feels quit linear and hardly ever makes you feel like you’re exploring.