Review:
Medal of Honor: Spearhead Expansion Pack
Reviewer: Cliff Hollis
Edited by: Mike Dixon (1/31/04)
Mac publisher: Aspyr Media ($19.99 est. retail price)

Aspyr Media, publisher of this expansion pack, was looking for a few good men, we were looking for a good add on. Do we need to keep looking? Read on and see.

Performance was spotty. I had to keep trying different video combinations to get the game to run without terrible artifacts in the video. A low resolution setting with medium detail setting was the only way to prevent this. The game crashed at least twice. I did not have this trouble with the original Medal of Honor game or any other game I have played on OS X.

I really enjoyed Medal of Honor: Allied Assault so I was looking forward to this expansion pack. I started the game after several frustrating moments fiddling with the settings. Things are different from before. After a simple single player mission with a scary parachute jump, you are thrust into several squad-based adventures. The hard part is you must keep your squad mate(s) alive. Failing to do so ends the mission in failure. You have no control over the fellow soldiers you are with so they tend to run off or die quickly. There are several large guns to man also like anti-aircraft guns for a bothersome Stuka, or anti-tank guns to kill Tigers with. This was a annoying add-in to me. You had to stop the typical first-person shooter role and play an old fashion arcade game.

The game is short with only three missions and nine levels so it plays quick. A few small touches have been added that were interesting, such as authentic WWII poems recited at the end of missions and authentic medals being awarded from various countries for successful missions. Another nice touch is added weapons and vehicles. You use a Russian machine gun near the end and drive a T-34 Russian tank while battling Tigers again. Warning: spoiler ahead: You actually end up in Berlin so you do get an interesting angle on what the war might have been like.

In addition to video resolution troubles there was a choppy video problem. At one critical point, video became so choppy I had a hard time finishing the mission. This did not seem to come back but other problems did. A phantom Tiger tank kept blowing things up but the tank literally never appeared. One mission had a door that would not open and kept being a problem.

This could have been a great addition to an interesting original game. It seemed short, rushed and lacking a cohesive direction. One moment you are playing a traditional first-person game, then a squad based adventure, and then a rail shooting arcade game. You can find these elements in other game titles that are much better presented.