"Medal of Honor" Closed Beta Impressions

This past Tuesday, the Medal of Honor Closed Beta popped up on my PS Store. I had hoped it would come out soon enough and to my luck, it did, but I feel a little short handed. I have had betas before and have usually enjoyed them completely.

The problem with this beta is, it feels as if the game is still in the Alpha stages of development. Texture glitches occur occasionally, the server synchronization is horrible and the graphics just don't seem as crisp as they could be.

To start off, getting killed in multi-player is beyond easy. As soon as you see a red splash on the screen, you are pretty much dead unlike in Modern Warfare 2. On the other hand, when you are trying to get a kill, 1 of 3 things can happen; the synchronization can change in favor of you or generally, your opponent. You can have the suppression mechanic work against you and throw off your aiming, allowing your opponent to get the kill, and then finally, you can get the kill if you can keep you sights on the enemy.

When it comes to the fluidity of gameplay, it is all over the place. The classes are fairly balanced like how DICE always does it, but the engine running the multiplayer just doesn't seem built for low bandwidth players like myself. This is really too bad considering that I had no lag issues in a beta for the 256 player multiplayer game MAG, but I can't stop having issues with Medal of Honor. This is actually a consistent problem with DICE products. I have Battlefield 2, Battlefield 1943 and I have also played the Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Multiplayer demo, and in all of these, their are considerable lag issues. I think they should talk to ZIPPER INTERACTIVE about streamlining the fluidity of gameplay.

Now in terms of fun, once I started learning the tricks of this game, I started to feel drawn back to it, even over the multiplayer giant Modern Warfare 2. This strikes me as odd because this means that there is something there, but they are just having trouble presenting it.

Hopefully through all the of the comments, impressions and responses on the beta, DICE will pull it together and put out a fully finished product in the end. Overall, in Medal of Honors current multiplayer state, it would only get 5/10