Medal of Honor - Above and Beyond is all about variety, addressing as many ugly and introspective facets of World War II as possible. At its core, you get an arcade-heavy linear shooter with free stick movement, alternating narrow corridors with more expansive squares. On the tour across occupied Europe, the player is put into so many different predicaments, from sneak passages to dives with motion controls, that it has never been experienced under the VR headset before. One moment you're taking up position on a rooftop to help liberate a small French town as a sniper or with the massive M1918A2 automatic rifle - elsewhere you're operating the guns of a tank as it roars across hilly fields.
These rail-shooter passages and moments in tightly confined locations usually prove to be a fun diversion. Friends of realistic war games will probably rather shake their heads at the overly reckless attacks. However, even they might concede that the war equipment and the idyllically swaying vegetation all around the headset come into their own under the arcade action.
Whether you duck under tank tracks while escaping through the trench or place an incendiary bomb on a gigantic railroad cannon to defend it against approaching reinforcements with bazookas and guns afterward: In this setting, the attention to detail that unfortunately can't be conveyed in flat videos becomes apparent again and again.
As soon as you get up close to cups and other objects in a hut, however, it becomes clear that the richness of detail here cannot keep up with Half-Life: Alyx. Instead, the developers have opted for a somewhat duller graphic style with fewer reflections, which is somewhat reminiscent of graphic novels. Thus, the Nazis and fellow members of the resistance group also look slightly overdrawn.
It is less fun to fight alongside the partners, as they suffer from similarly strong AI quirks as the Germans. Sometimes they blithely shoot into cover, elsewhere they suddenly stop as if frozen and don't move at all.
Conclusion
Respawn has partly failed in its demands to produce a triple-A shooter with an incredible amount of variety in Medal of Honor - Above and Beyond. With a bit more focus, it could have been a really good action title. However, the game feels unfinished in many places. Perhaps the team simply lacked an external voice that would rigorously cut weak passages and make sure that well-functioning ones were expanded. Especially in the tricky field of VR game design, variety isn't everything after all, which is especially evident in flawed gunplay and action interludes.
