World War II shooters - not only are they based on perhaps the PC's most iconic genre, the FPS, but when you look at the types of shooters out there that can be labeled and categorized based on theme, this era of war has got to be, if not the most popular, at least very high up on the list, which is hardly surprising given the immensely strong interest still found in today's world for this period of warfare. Leading the way for the genre has been two series of note - Call of Duty, and Medal of Honor. With COD now moving on from the past to the present battlefields, the MOH series finds itself pretty lonely in the WWII FPS genre with its latest release in Medal of Honor: Airborne, which aims to deliver a unique approach, but ends up falling into the familiar habits.

Featuring both singleplayer campaign and multiplayer modes, Airborne lives up to its name in the way you enter most maps and battlefields - via an air drop as you take control of a US Army airborne solider named 'Travis'. This is also how your character re-spawns after death, meaning even in the singleplayer campaign mode instead of having to reload the last checkpoint upon defeat you're basically just thrown back into the action with little delay. The game delivers this air drop feature almost as a game inside a game allowing you to maneuver your way down to the ground (ideally to a green smoke area identifying a 'safe zone'), where your angle and terrain of choice can determine the success of your landing.

The thing is, it just isn't a very significant part of the game at all. In real life the airborne soldiers were crucial for the Allied assault on Nazi forces but in the land of videogames, we're so used to just being loaded into the right place at the right time effectively bypassing the means of getting there that actually experiencing the airdrop stage doesn't seem to offer much to the package outside of a quick mini-game that gets repetitive pretty quickly, and worse it doesn't seem to matter at all how you land - even if you do botch a landing, the only consequence is your character taking an extra few seconds to compose himself before you are allowed to take control, which is a harmless set back when landing in 'green zones' anyway.

The only useful thing about the presence of air deployments is the fact you can dictate where you start a level by landing there, which is a pretty cool feature. There are usually more than one green zones to aim for but you can basically land anywhere you want - the game even has a few skilled landing spots to achieve further adding to the mini-game feel of the airborne element. Even though each map in the campaign mode has preset objectives and events that are location dependant meaning if you land further away it just means you've got further to move, the freedom of movement in this game is still quite exceptional. There is almost always more than one way or more than one direction you can attack an objective thanks to the openness of the level designs.

This fact lends very well to the overall 'war time' feel of the game. A lot of attention to detail both visually and design wise has gone into the creation of the environments you fight in not only allowing for this enhanced freedom of movement when compared to other titles of this nature but in general allowing for a much more authentic feel to the game thanks to the fact you'll rarely encounter those atmosphere killing 'invisible walls' preventing you from going in a particular direction. The game still has boundaries of course, but thanks to clever level design you never think twice when you reach one and continue on your merry way towards the objectives. The environments also look great as does the game in general, featuring Unreal Engine 3 technology.

Unfortunately though, this open feel to the design just doesn't translate all the way into the gameplay. Much like MOH titles of the past, Airborne is still very much an 'on rails' experience that, when you take the trivial airborne element away, basically plays and feels much like every MOH title before it. From start to finish in this game you're basically doing the same things over and over - land, shoot a few bad guys, move to the next level. Rinse and repeat. There just isn't much variation on offer here at all even by WWII FPS standards. Even if you've never played a MOH game, the repetition will be hard to overlook because the gameplay is really that unvaried. The most variation you'll likely see in this game is the strengths and weaknesses of different weapons, and that's not much at all.

The saving grace here if there is one that could make you overlook the lack of variation and heavy presence of repetition is the fact that Airborne is still quite fun to play regardless. This is not a game where ultra realism is the focus; this is very much an arcade style shooter that brings the action and more or less never lets down until the closing credits, featuring stuff like auto-replenishing health and mid game weapon upgrades. Around every corner and down every set of stairs you will encounter the enemy, allowing the game's campaign mode to flow very nicely as you make your way through the stages of the Allied assault on Nazi occupation of Europe and, despite the reasonably large open levels, you never get lost or confused not knowing what to do next thanks to a very clear mini-map system. The only real issue with the mechanics of the gameplay is the somewhat dodgy enemy AI, which I can best describe as 'telepathic robotic AI' - they almost always know exactly where you are regardless of your own visibility and they also seem to constantly target you with insanely accurate shots and not your fellow AI soldiers when they can. There also seems to be a slight presence of animation glitches, where enemy soliders can't be shot during some animations at times (for example, hurdling a bench), which can be responsible for quite a lot of wasted ammo. I guess it's a good thing then that in a complimentary fashion for the fast paced arcade style gameplay, ammo supply is rarely if ever going to be a issue as there is always plenty lying around.

On one hand retaining the MOH style of gameplay (that is, traditional no frills FPS gameplay) has made Airborne an instant decent shooter, but we've played this game so many times already that an updated graphics engine and slightly modified delivery just doesn't do enough to make this fresh. The airborne approach is interesting at first but it quickly becomes a loading screen replacement rather than a true element of the gameplay, resorting back to stuff we've played time and time again. But it's still a good game - there is plenty of action and honestly, you will forget how similar the experience is to every other MOH game pretty quickly into the almost arcadey addictive shooting gameplay even if it can be described as repetitive. MOH: Airborne won't be on anyone's lips come GOTY PC time, but it's still good for some fun shooting action that you don't have to think much about.