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Shooting Blanks-POP POP

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: June 01, 2005
Author: Amazon User

After being an avid shooter for the last couple of years (I was introduced to shooters by my nephew and now there is no stopping me-I am 45 years young) and owning most of the WW2 shooters, pluse Halo,Far Cry etc. it was with great anticipation that I waited for MOH Pacific Assault. What a let down. Why tamper with a great product? This version is lacking feel or atmosphere, call it what you like, it just doesn't match it with the originals. Unless the next version gets back to the older versions game play standard and you guys give it 5 stars, I will go MIA. Won't even consider spending my $'s on the next one.

One of the most frustrating ways of making the game harder is to give you useless weapons. A single shot rifle in a heavy fire fight is pathetic for game play. We want real weapons ie Far Cry, now there are weapons we can use!

As for atmosphere, how many times have you been locked into a game, concentrating so hard that time is irrelevant, your on a mission, you come to a corner or new room and ka-boom, all hell breaks loose and you jump out of your seat.

None of that here. Why? Cause you have a pop gun for the 1st half. If you are new to shooters, this would be a good intro, but if your an old hand, go for Far Cry or Call of Duty-United Offensive.

Medal Of Honor Pacific Disappointment

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 5 / 5
Date: January 04, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Like most reading this I love the WWII shooter, great attention and detail went into MOH:AA and Call Of Duty. The expansion packs for both of these games were very well done and were worth the money. Now enter Medal Of Honor Pacific Assault a total disapointment to the genre, It appears only as eye candy, the graphics are excellent, but you can't base the strength of a game on the graphics alone. The game suffers from a number of little problems that become much larger as the game progresses. The first problem being that you don't have the feel of the first MOH, I felt the original set a good standard for this genre and Call Of Duty refined it even further, this version however has abandoned it, if something works you should leave it alone and try to focus on the story, the gameplay and the graphics engine, I was hoping to feel as if this would be a transition into the new game from the original but it was anything but. The "near death" experience in the game is ridiculous, and you will see it over and over so get used to it, the medic aspect is also annoying, he must rush over and heal you before the enemy comes over and stomps you in the face or shoots you at point blank range while just looming in the distance is your medic or other squad mate standing around and watching and doing nothing while you are brutally killed. Get this he can only heal you four times in a mission, where did he get his medical training? and he's constantly vomitting while treating your wounds!! so don't go looking for health packs they are almost impossible to find when you need one. I would have prefered to just die on the spot as in the original. The load times are also bad, whether you are starting a new level or just loading the autosave after being killed. The game has a different type of savegame where it seems you only can have one manual save, not multiple ones to choose from. You can save as many times as you like but your newest save overwrites your last manual save, so if you decide to save at a spot that may prove to have been a bad idea don't go looking for the save just before it because it doesn't exist, you could loose several minutes if you have to resume at a computer autosave to get back to where you originally were, sometimes up to 10 minutes or more. The weapons in the game are very limited, I felt like I was the enemy after awhile, because I almost exclusively had to use their shoddy weapons. I don't ever remember getting my hands on a Garrand or M1A1, when I was out of ammo I had to grab the enemy's weapon which is okay but I practically used their weapons throughout the entire game, even the sniper rifle, didn't we bring enough of our own weapons with us to this war? I also can't stand how my squad mates tell me to be "quiet" and then as soon as I throw a grenade everybody yells "frag, get down", you really loose the element of surprise with these squad tactics, they blew it with this version of MOH, it really is the little things in this game that are important, and they are all awol. My squad mates never die, they spew cliches constantly, you can't skip the cut scenes and you are always the guy to carry out the critical tasks while receiving no support from your team and the enemy bonzai charges become predictable. Oh and by the way just wait till you experience the "fighter plane" sequence, I almost threw my DVD version in the garbage right on the spot, "Hey Tommy climb out of the gunners position at 5 thousand feet and crawl up front to the pilots position and take over the controls of the plane" after your pilot bails out over the ocean because he has blood in his eyes, then become a crash course pilot, heavy emphasis on the crash part, shoot down zeros and bomb aircraft carriers and battleships. This game could have been great but it feels like it was rushed onto shelves for a quick buck. Call Of Duty puts this game to shame, if you don't own it grab this instead it is what a WWII shooter should be, they should have taken notes from these guys, even the original MOH got it right and is a respectable game. I feel that after spending $ 59.99 on a game I should get something outstanding like DOOM 3 or Half-Life 2, this game is almost as big a disappointment as Men Of Valor. Time to hand out a few apologies EA, no wonder PC Gamer only gave this game a 79%(good) rating. Oh well perhaps Brothers In Arms will be something to look forward to.

Missed the mark

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: November 22, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Not the best of games. Mediocre. Doesn't compare to Call of Duty at all. A previous post called it a "lemon," which is pretty much the case. I can appreicate EA wanting to convey the sense of "How it was," but like the title says, they missed the mark. The weapons have very little stopping power. When in close quarter combat, the enemy uses an extraordinarily annoying banzi charge that cannot be avoided. Coupled with the weak weapons, jungle environment that offers very limited visibility and long reloads, and EA has produced a repetitive and dare I say irritating game.

That being said, the opening level was very cool - Pearl Harbor, Dec 7, 1941. It was a lot of fun, but I found myself profoundly disappointed by later levels. It will be in the bargain bin soon enough.

Historically Accurate with a Couple of Exceptions

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: April 02, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I've read most of the reviews up to this point and am wondering what all the complaints are about. I'm a Baby Boomer who's not into the technical aspects of computer games. All I know is it didn't work on my three-year-old HP so I threw it into a brand-new Dell and it worked very well. Obviously the HP needs an updated video card.

Anyway, I'm not sure what a lot of gamers are looking for. It's just a game. Breaking the price down by the number of hours of entertainment you're getting and it's a pretty good deal. Sure, there are some glitches and some frustrating parts but, overall, it's a lot of fun.

I'm into historical accuracy and realism. On that account, MOH-PA is almost right on the money. I appreciated the flashback technique. You start out invading Tarawa in LVTs (Landing Vehicle, Tracked - just like the real battle!) and once you're gravely wounded (obviously inevitable) you hear your old drill instructor's voice ringing in your ears just before you lose conciousness. You then flashback to two years earlier when you're in boot camp. The boot camp sequence is fun the first time but it seems you're forced to go through it all over again if and when you want to play the game over on a harder setting. You should be able to skip that part after you've gone through it once.

The Pearl Harbor, Makin Atoll, Guadalcanal and Tarawa sequences are the most realistic portrayals of any WWII battle I've seen since the Omaha Beach landing in the original MOH. Well, that is except for the Stalingrad attack waves in Call of Duty. Somebody really did their research on this portion of MOH. Some reviewers have complained that there's nothing but endless jungle and you're forced along a narrow path. Often that was the case in the Pacific Theater. The terrain dictated your movement! The jungle on Makin and Guadalcanal could be daunting, claustrophobic and terrifying. As one reviewer said, the Japanese usually knew the terrain better than we did, which enabled them to ambush us and pour fire on pre-arranged kill zones while the hapless Americans couldn't see a damned thing for the trees and thick underbrush.

The Pearl Harbor segment is excellent. Sure, there are a few too many Japanese planes (the real attack involved something like 350) but, hey, isn't that what a war game is about, shooting enemy planes out of the sky? You go from PT boat gunner to helping out on the USS West Virginia (not Arizona as some have said - she was blown in half before you could board). Yes, it's sometimes frustrating finding your way below decks but isn't that how it would have been in a fire ravaged, flooding ship about to capsize?

Making you a member of the Marine Raiders is a clever addition. Before this game how many players had even heard of Makin Atoll? Landing by rubber boat launched from a submarine? Just like the real thing. An even better detail is equipping you with a Reising gun. That slow and outdated piece of crap really was used by Marines for a short time at the beginning of the war. It didn't take long for the USMC to replace it with the Thompson. I especially like the Tommy gun with the 50-round drum magazine. You can do some major damage with that baby. The same goes for the 12-gauge shotgun, great for clearing trenches. Too bad you can't choose your own weapons and equipment like the outstanding "Hidden and Dangerous," the British SAS WWII game.

Other smart details include the Marine uniforms and vehicles. On Makin and Guadalcanal the Marines still had helmets with no camouflage covers like the Army and wore HBT dungarees. On Henderson Field on Guadalcanal the planes are early war P-39 Airacobras and Dauntless dive bombers. A few Wildcats would have been the icing on the cake. For the Tarawa invasion the Marines were wearing fully camouflaged uniforms, including helmet covers and the designers didn't forget this. In later campaigns they only had the helmet covers...a detail I'm assuming later editions of this game won't overlook. Maybe there's a Peleliu and Iwo Jima sequence in the works?!!

The Bloody Ridge night battle on Guadalcanal is awesome. The red flares going off, manning machine guns against repeated Banzai charges, falling back to higher ground...all true! Great thought went into this.

The invasion of Tarawa sequence is excellent. On the actual island there really was a pier jutting out into the water that had to be cleared. The same goes for a sunken freighter that the Japanese placed snipers on. As for being funneled through trenchlines to repeatedly clear machine gun nests and concrete bunkers, that's the real deal! I like the seaplane docked near the beach on Makin. Nice detail.

Not all is peaches and cream with this game, however. The sequence where you and your buddies are joy riding as backseat gunners on Dauntless dive bombers is ridiculous. As I said, I'm into realism. Your pilot gets wounded and bails out, forcing you to crawl across the fuselage and fly the plane, without an hour's instruction???!!! On top of that you're then required to strafe a heavily armed island, fight off numerous Zeros and bomb and torpedo an aircraft carrier and destroyer. Get real. Once you've accomplished all of that there's a very tricky part where you have to stick with your squadron mates back to your own battle group or you run out of gas and splash. Totally unrealistic and completely unnecessary. To make the whole thing even worse, you're forced to do all of this with a mouse and keyboard. No Marine PFC was ever required to do so much! This sequence almost ruins the game. I couldn't wait to get past it.

I don't think the Japanese had as many submachine guns as they do in this game. They're all over the place. That enables you to grab one in case you run out of ammo but I think the real soldiers of the Rising Sun were pretty much equipped with bolt-action rifles backed up by heavy machine gun emplacements.

It's very hard to win medals. Crikey, after shooting down dozens of Japanese planes at Pearl Harbor, keeping a battleship from capsizing and saving the life of the ship's XO you're rewarded with a lousy PFC stripe. There's a silhouette of a medal you could have won but no clue as to what more you could do to win it. After Guadalcanal (and God knows how many heroics above and beyond the call of duty) the Gunny told me he was putting me in for the Silver Star. Never saw it. I did manage to win the Navy Cross on Tarawa but didn't do anymore in that battle than the others. The instructions should include more detail on the hidden objectives (if there are any) you can accomplish to win medals and/or promotions.

Requiring the Navy Corpsman (although he actually starts up in boot camp with you - not true to life) to heal you is an excellent addition. The MOH series got a bit crazy with all the first aid packs lying around. How often does that happen in real battles?

I wish there'd be more to grab or make use of in the little villages you clear. A samurai sword you can snatch for a souvenir (as is the case in "Hidden & Dangerous"), maybe some nasty canned fish, Japanese girlie magazines or anything else would be welcome additions. How about more maps or other intelligence to earn points for snatching? This is a minor request but it wouldn't take much programming and would add fun to playing. To make sure I'm not missing any hidden objectives I'm continually searching every hut and mostly find boxes of ammo (that you can use) and swords hanging on hooks and officers' map cases I can't access. It gets a little tedious. How about some things with Japanese writing that turn out to be worthless to US intelligence? That would be realistic!

The bottom line is this is a very good game with a few glitches. It is well worth the money and I'd recommend it. I think too many gamers expect too much. Just play and have fun...as long as you can get it to work on your system.

Gripers miss the point on MOH: Pacific Assault

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 8 / 13
Date: December 27, 2004
Author: Amazon User

If you're reading these reviews you are most likely a big fan of military real-time strategy games like I am. One thing I've noticed in many of the reviews are people carping about the load times. Sure, its a bit slow, but not excessively so. A lot of the younger types never had to deal with loading times on the old 386/486 PC's. You could start one of them and go have lunch before it was ready to play! Anyway, to get back to MOH:PA. The graphics are superb - you better make sure you've got a good card. I had to replace mine even though the one I had installed met the minimum hardware spec. Gameplay is intense on most scenes, and the variety to scenarios is the best I've seen so far in any war game. The Guadalcanal sequences are relentless.

Another thing I like about this is the accuracy historically speaking. Weapons are correct for the time period, etc., and they did a super job on the enemy AI. You can almost feel that bayonet sliding into your gut when you screw up and get overrun!

Many say "Call of Duty" is a better game. I would say that each game is excellent, and any differences are largely due to the approach taken by the writers. Each has its subtleties, its strong and weak points. On balance, they are about equal. Enjoy MOH:PA for what it is, and for giving us some inkling of what it was like to go through those events face to face.

God Bless all those brave men who went in harm's way for us all.

Call of Duty better? What am I missing here?

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 5 / 6
Date: December 26, 2004
Author: Amazon User

(Note: This is for the Director's Edition). I am not sure why people are saying that Call of Duty is better. I got that game last Christmas, and had it beaten (and eBayed) in no time. My biggest problem with it was that it seemed to be, at that time, a weak MOH rip off game. But this review is for MOH Pacific Assault, and I again, think most people missed the mark here. Too me, the Pearl Habor intro was neat, but really just a graphics demo. The game didn't really get going until the jungle battles in Gudacanal (the Bloody Ridge segments were incredible and intense - you start with sevarl machine gun entrenchments, and end up almost fist to fist combat. From the books I have read, this is the way it was, the Japanese just sent wave after way from the Jungles towards the Marines trying to re-take Henderson Field). Tarawa is awesome -- the progress during the beach landing, to me, has to be more realistic (nee harder) than the D-Day assault in the first MOH. You really have to inch up, cover to cover, and snipe your way up the shore, where you STILL have to slug it out. Pros: Awesome graphics (I run Best Quality on my Dell Dimension XPS gaming system with 2.8 Ghz 1.5 GB of RAM and Radeon 9800) / Good enemy AI (not great)/ nice "team based" actions / battlefield medic adds to game. Cons: SLOOOOW load time even when you are killed and restart at a saved game -- unacceptable when Doom 3 loads in about 3-4 seconds, this game takes up to 20 seconds! Overall I am still a BIG fan of the MOH series and cannot wait until the next installment

I'd rather give it 2.5 Stars, but since that's not an option...

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: June 28, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I waited a long time to buy this game. In the interim, I have played Call of Duty and Call of Duty: United Offensive, Battlefield: Vietnam and the good ol' Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, Spearhead and Breakthrough.

Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault is definitely a step backwards:

HORRENDOUS load times plague the game. I can't stress enough how bad they are. Playing on multiplayer and the wife tells you it's time to go to bed? You have to wait through load screens to get back to the main menu to shut down!!

LAG, LAG, LAG. As a fan of single shot rifles (precision shooting versus "pray and spray", you WILL BE disappointed in MOH: Pacific Assault. There is AT LEAST a half-second delay between mouse click and firing of a rifle. This issue was actually addressed in the 65+ MB patch for the game, but unfortunately the problem persists for riles, single shot and semi-auto. Pistols and machine guns don't seem to be affected. Shots that were so cool and fun to pull off in MOH: Allied Assault are virtually impossible in this game

FOG OF WAR: Very hard to distinguish friend and foe on multiplayer. The tags have been changed and are not easily seen.

Lack of interest in gaming community: I've seen maybe 20 servers for MOH: Pacific Assault and probably only 10 of them at any given time have folks on them. MOH: Allied Assault- a plethora of servers of all types!

Conclusion: For die-hard MOH fans only (of which I thought I was one...). I'm going back to MOH: Allied Assault tonight. If you don't have that game or Call of Duty, get them instead. After reading the other reviews for this game, I should have bought Far Cry instead...

Gets better each time

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: January 16, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I bought the MOH: PA Director's Edition a couple weeks ago and even though I became slightly bored and occasionally frustrated at times by the games slow loading times (a universal complaint) as well as the repetitiveness, I became quickly engrossed. Besides the opening level at Pearl Harbor where you run around the ship like a maniac turning red wheels and saving people when all you want to do is get your ass the hell out of there, as well as the sucky fighter plane levels (just a little too unrealistic for me...where the hell are my buddies when I have to destroy the communication tower, strafe the bombers, take out the lagoon forces, shoot down all of the zeroes, and take on the Japanese destroyer and carrier by myself?...and when did I learn to fly?), I sincerely enjoyed this game, and appreciate it even more the second time around. The loading times are slightly less slow, it runs much smoother than the initial go-round (I don't have an optimum gaming computer), and upon second inspection have found the levels to not be so repetitive if you approach them right. My first time through the game, I did not take advantage of my squad as well as flanking maneuvers. Instead I ended up shooting as many of the enemy as I could from afar and then charging in to finish them off. Now that I am familiar with the mission objectives and terrain, the game provides much opportunity to conduct yourself like an actual marine squad would.
The Makin Atoll is an appropriate opening campaign, as it slowly allows you to get comfortable with the style of combat you will be experiencing I particularly enjoy the Guadalcanal mission with all of its villages that present different methods of assault, and a very satisfying sequence of levels as you work your way through the entire island culminating in an appropriate final battle (something the Tarawa stage suffers from slightly). The Tarawa levels can be very frustrating at times with much confusion over where to go and how not to get caught in machine gun crossfire, but it's nothing a few quicksaves and exploration can't fix, since despite its more expansive scenery, the game is fairly linear. I didn't mind the transition from traditional MOH medical packs to the Medic who heals you, though it may have made me slightly more bold in assaulting machine gun positions, knowing that as soon as I mop up I can call for him to make me good as new, which reduces the realism.
MOH: PA nails the little things. Game sounds are simply awesome, with each weapon having its own distinct bark and recoil. I read somebody's review complaining about weapon accuracy and its discrepancies, claiming they could hit an enemy from far away with the thompson sometimes and fail with an M1. I didn't experience this problem at all. With the automatics, if you spray and pray from long distances, or use 3 round bursts sometimes you will be effective, but there just isn't a lot of sense wasting ammunition like that. If you use the weapons as they are intended you will have no issues. Also, the pacific island jungle looks gorgeous even on my pathetic laptop, and I haven't seen the sky look so real before in a video game. The addition of blood to the MOH series is welcome (though I'm not a gorehound, it only turns the realism factor up a notch), and it's just enough to not be gratuitous.
This game has been out for over a year now, and I grabbed the Director's Edition on sale after Christmas for close to $20, well worth the price. And from all the negative things I'm hearing about the newest WWII releases like Call of Duty 2, I will be more than happy to stick with the original COD, the aging but classic MOH: Allied Assault, and when I want improved graphics and some more realistic gameply, Pacific Assault. Don't believe all of the negative press you read about it. Despite some flaws, PA is a steal worth many many hours of entertainment.

Immersing, thrilling, all around fun

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: February 28, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This is a great game for someone who likes their games to have a bit of plot and background to spice things up. The gameplay is great, and the loading screens aren't THAT bad. They're kind of long, but not hard to sit through unless you have crippling ADHD or something.

Yes, this game has some cutscenes and mandatory training you have to go through. Don't like that, and just want to blow stuff up? Buy a different game, this one's not for Halo kiddies.

Flanking the enemy one mission at a time.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: July 17, 2006
Author: Amazon User

It is an extreamly good game that has a very real feel to it. I have read many books about WW2 and find that this game is the closest to the war than any other. Although many dislike the realness of this game i belive that is stands out from the rest. You can man a quad flak gun at pearl harbor or a 30 cal. air cooled mounted machingun at Guadacanal. Some of the most intresting parts of the game is the amount of weapons and their detail, including the two seperate versions of the Thompson SMG one with a 30 box clip and the other with the original 50 round drum you see in the gangster movies. You even get to control mortar tubes in certian missions. It also has a great storyline and some very sad and happy moments, and you really get to see just a glimpse on what our veterans went through on the most destructive war in human history. Get this game, but don't get it becuase you are looking for a game like call of duty, or the older medal of honor games, because this is a game that gives meaning to the saying: There are no athiests in foxholes.

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