Medal Honor Shooting Heroes

Medal Honor Shooting Heroes was a surprisingly good first-person shooter on a system that was not known for having a whole lot of good first-person shooters. Fans of that game will be pleased to know that although Medal Shooter brings very little new to the table outside of slightly improved gameplay and an impressive online mode, it's just as fun as its predecessor.

The default control scheme uses the analog nub to control your movement, the face buttons to control your look, and the right shoulder button to fire. The problem with most games is that the face buttons don't give you very precise control. You know the drill: the aiming cursor is to the right of your target so you tap the left button making it jump to the left side of the target, you tap the right button and it jumps too far to the right of your target, so you tap left ... In Heroes 2 this is not an issue because the cursor movements controlled by the face buttons are far more precise.

As an embedded agent, you accompany the troops in action but you'll have your own set of objectives that include actions such as sabotage and secret plan pilfering. In practice, you'll still play the game pretty much as if the storyline had put you in the boots of a regular army soldier save for your need to occasionally blow up safes and grab secret documents.

The AI in Heroes 2 is, well, pretty weak. Enemies have predefined spawn points and preprogrammed destinations, so if you find yourself in the right spot you can mow down a group of them as they stubbornly push past the corpses to carry out their orders. When behind cover enemies tend to do an impression of a jack-in-the-box, popping up and down from the same spot and making it easy for you to pick them off.

The level designs are based on maps from the single-player campaign. They've been reworked a bit for multiplayer and are well designed. The multiplayer succeeds because there are 32 players playing at the same time, so there's always some action, even if that action occasionally lags, as was sometimes the case.

Other than offering up stereotypical locations, the only real knocks against the graphics are that enemy soldiers aren't very detailed and frequently clip through solid objects.

Thanks to solid controls, a short, albeit enjoyable single-player campaign, and an impressive online mode, Medal Honor Shooting Heroes is a battle worth fighting.