Medal of Honor 2 for the PSP

The latest game I have been playing on my PSP is Medal of Honor 2 (screenshots at the end of the post). It was released just a month ago as a successor to the first PSP version Medal of Honor: Heroes. Both games have excellent graphics, and are a joy to play. If you haven’t figured out from the name, the game is a first person shooter war game. You play an allied soldier during World War 2 that has been dropped off in a German occupied city, and you are asked to liberate it. The campaign mode takes you from the beach, into a village, then into it’s sewers to destroy a hidden bunker and finally into a top secret production facility where the Nazis are producing a secret weapon.


I would say the controls are the game’s greatest strength, since they ar e very natural. If you select the “Elite” control set through the options menu (just hit start ingame to access it), the D-pad will allow you to manually aim your rifle at the enemy. Then you can use the OXTS (O, X, Triangle, Square) buttons to move your character forward or backwards. Since these buttons are located on the other side of the D-Pad, you can use one hand for moving and the other for aiming. You shoot and zoom in using the L and T keys with your thumbs. What scheme could be more natural for a first person shooter?

The game itself is easy to play too, at least on the “Green” level. So even if you are not a great gamer, you can still enjoy Medal of Honour 2 without getting frustrated. I have managed to get through most of the campaign without any trouble, except the end. In the final battle, you have 5 minutes to get out of the bunker. However you are onset by hundreds of German soldiers waiting for you at the gate. There is no way that I could have gotten out that fast without dieing.

The dieing concept in MOH2 is quite good too, because it is not so direct and you can last for a long time. Instead of having a health bar that depletes or refills in a linear fasion, you have a current health status. If you are catching hundreds of bullets at a time, your screen will turn red and after some time you will drop dead. However if you manage to get cover, and wait for a bit, you will gain your health status back and be like a new soldier. This makes it very useful if you are playing through a long map with a lot of enemy soldiers.

One beef I have with the game is that there is no quick play modes. You can only play a singleplayer campaign or an online multiplayer map. There is no option for you to have a quick battle on a random map while you are waiting for the bus. This option was available in Medal of Honor: Heroes, so I don’t understand why they removed it in the second version.

Screenshots