Gamers who played Medal of Honor will remember Manon, part of the French Resistance, who was an enormous help toward his efforts. Still set in the era of World War II, the year is 1940 and the German armies have overrun Manon’s town. Attempting to survive with her brother and the few people still around in her town, Manon’s best companion, her brother, is tragically killed during a routine raid to retrieve weapon supplies. Manon then sets out to meet up with her brother’s contacts in order to fight against the Nazis. It will take all her strength and perseverance in order to move up the ranks in the OSS so that she can head back home and help in the liberation of her nation.

Medal of Honor: Underground isn’t called Medal of Honor 2 for a reason: the game is not much of a drastic change from Medal of Honor. Fortunately, in this case, this is terrific thing; the original was a fantastic game, and this follow-up is no different. MoH: Underground takes the best parts from MoH and improves upon them in various aspects. Easily, the best way that DreamWorks has improved is in the types of missions that Manon goes on. Of course, there are still the classic missions where she dressed up in a disguise and sneaks around looking for information, but one of the earlier ones requires Manon to take out the tanks that are patrolling the area. It’s a bit tricky to figure out at first, but the feeling of satisfaction that comes from shooting down three men out at the same time while simultaneously attacking a monstrous tank firing a machine gun at you is like none other. DreamWorks could have easily taken the same style of missions from MoH and popped them in here and it would have been just as good, but the creativity in MoH: Underground certainly makes it that much better overall.

There have not been many changes in terms of the game engine, but as with the rest of the game, that isn’t inherently a bad thing. The only real changes that seem to have been made are to accommodate for the more amount of enemies that can make it on the screen at once (though if there are more than three the game will start to have frame rate problems), as well as the complexities of the enemies in terms of animation, artificial intelligence and such. The game environments are much more varied now; Manon will travel from the streets littered with guards, to the blazing sands of the desert and through the catacombs of the underground. Many of the scripted events are extremely cool, too, and instead of forcing a cut-scene upon the player, it allows them to interact with it, dramatic music, firefights and all.

It’s an all too often occurrence where developers work on creating the prettiest graphics for their games, and then when it comes to working on the smaller details, things are tossed together at the last minute. More often than not, artificial intelligence is one of the areas forgotten about. MoH: Underground, however, has some of the best artificial intelligence around, even if it is a bit on the flaky side. As soon as a enemy sees you, instead of charging at you with their weapons whipped out, they’ll duck behind a wall and lean over the wall and shoot, making it hard for you to take them out, or perhaps jump to the ground and roll around while firing. What happens, though, is that the enemies either react in the aforementioned ways, or completely ignore you. Enemies would stare straight at me as I walked up to them and popped a few bullets into their head, right in front of them.

One of the more disappointing aspects of MoH was the multiplayer. MoH in itself doesn’t seem like the multiplayer type of game, but since multiplayer features have exploded in the last generation, DreamWorks went and tossed it in. Allowing up to two players to play at the same time, multiplayer MoH is decent at best, but still rather boring and uninteresting. The maps are better this time around, and there are enough options that fans of the game should be entertained, but there are still problems, one of which being collision detection. A couple of times, without trying, my character would ‘fall’ into a wall and get stuck, and couldn’t do anything until he was killed.

DreamWorks and Electronic Arts have done it again with MoH: Underground. It’s definitely one of the best first person shooter experiences out there, and while it more of an expansion pack to MoH than an all new game, that doesn’t detract it from being a must own for fans of the genre, the original game, and gaming all together.