EA has released the latest edition to their Medal of Honor FPS series. This time you are a paratrooper in the 82nd airborne division, giving you the chance to destroy Nazis all over Europe from Italy, to Holland, France and of course Germany.

In all of the past Medal of Honor games you have some support from friendly units, but in Airborne the landscape is almost always swarming with them, as they are constantly falling out of the sky. Despite large numbers of allied soldiers assisting you at all times, they are not all that useful as anything apart from decoys, and as with most other FPS' you pretty much singlehandedly win the war.

The game features a pretty standard WWII Weapons set. On the US Side there is my old favorite the M1 Garand, the Thompson Submachine Gun, BAR, Springfield M1903 Sniper, the Mk.II Frag Grenade and the M1A1 Rocket Launcher. On the Axis side there is the Kar98k, the Gewehr 43, Sturmgewehr 44, MP40 SMG, MG42 light machine gun, Model 24 "Potato Masher" and everyones favorite the Panzerschreck. You can start each mission with any two of these weapons (excluding the MG42 and Rocket Launchers) in addition to a colt pistol and grenades, and can swap your 2 primary weapons with any that you find on the corpses of your enemies, or more often, your allies. Weapons are upgraded as your experience with the individual weapon grows, for example scopes, doubled up clips, and for some reason I got a shoulder stock for my luger.

Graphics are good, the game is built in the Unreal3 Engine, my only complaint is that a lot of things are inexplicably shiny, including aircraft and soldiers. My computer handled it without any hassles on 1280x1024.

Gameplay for most of the game was engrossing, however the last mission was just plain silly, It was virtually me vs. the entire of the German army. Luckily if you die you just parachute in again and keep going from the last checkpoint with fresh ammo and full health. I also thought the game was rather short, I only bought it yesterday and I was our for most of yesterday and today. The way the enemies spawn is sometimes a bit flawed, for example at one stage in the game I was in a room and they were spawning right in front of me, and they would often spawn in dead end rooms that you have just walked out of. Like your allies the Germans also appear to have adopted a Zap Brannigan strategy to warfare, and in later missions will swarm at you non-stop until you complete the nearby objective when the landscape becomes eerily quiet.

The only advanced movements are peaking around corners, which was disappointing. The NPC's can give suppressive fire from behind obstacles as you can in Rainbow 6 Vegas, however as far as I can tell there is no way for the player to do so.

The game did not crash once whilst I was playing it, which is surprising considering EA made it and there was no patch half the size of the game itself the day after it was released. So good work EA on that front.

Overall I'd give it a 7/10. Ok, not great.