When I finally get to play Medal of Honor‘s single-player for myself (starting with a Ranger mission in the middle of the campaign called “Belly of the Beast”), the first thing I see is a bunch of soldiers looking out at a group of Chinook helicopters heading to Afghanistan. This stands out because it’s actually a modern day version of the opening scene from Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (which itself cribbed from the opening of Saving Private Ryan), in which the player is aboard a boat and looks out over the horizon to see all the other landing craft bearing their way to the beaches of Normandy. This modernization of D-Day continues onward, with lots of soldier banter and, when they step out of Chinooks, they get pounded by RPGs and assault-rifle fire the same way the Germans pounded the boats with machine guns. After the same initial shock of in-your-face combat, you (as Ranger Dante Adams) have to rally with the rest of your squad across a chaotic battlefield.
It’s not just the situation of “guys in transports getting smacked and then dealing with hostiles” that’s the same in Medal of Honor. As I zip around a village filled with insurgents, I notice another conscious callback to the original game: leaning. It’s not something you find much nowadays, due to the preponderance of cover-based systems (which is also loosely present in the game), and it’s a bit awkward to pull off on a gamepad — you hold down the left-bumper to activate “lean mode” where the Left thumbstick moves your head, not your body.
