When Infinity Ward brought Call of Duty into the modern era with Modern Warfare, the fourth installment of the popular first-person shooter series garnered extreme critical praise and massive sales. Electronic Arts hopes to give its famed Medal of Honor the same treatment with the latest installment of Medal of Honor, simply titled “Medal of Honor.” GameXplain had the opportunity to go behind closed doors with the multiplayer portion of the game at E3 2010. In short, the new Medal of Honor plays a lot like a mix between the Modern Warfare and Battlefield: Bad Company games; and it sort of should, since it is made by DICE, the developers behind the Bad Company games.

Unlike Bad Company, Medal of Honor doesn’t seem to focus on vehicles. From the multiplayer levels I was able to play, the game looks like it takes place in the Middle East. Levels are covered in dust and sand and the architecture in one of the levels in which I played team death match looks and feel eerily similar to Karachi, a level found in Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare 2. While that level was relatively modest in size, another desert level had us running across much larger desert grounds in a team-based defend/attack capture point mode.

Like Bad Company, Medal of Honor offers default soldier classes like rifleman and sniper classes. While archetypes are nice, you can also modify and customize these classes to suit your specific needs. Another aspect that Medal of Honor shares with Bad Company are the destructible environments. Hiding under thin pieces of wood won’t do you any good from machine gun fire, for instance.

One gripe that I did have with the gameplay, and that I have with many other online multiplayer shooters, is that I found myself dying quite often after immediately respawning. Granted, the game is still not done yet and EA still has time to iron these kinks, but if this is a huge issue for you, you might want to take note.

Otherwise the game looks, sounds, and feels real solid. It controls and feels similar to Modern Warfare/Bad Company and looks comparable to both shooters. Like both games, you automatically regenerate health over time, you are killed pretty easily when you’re spotted, the guns are pretty typical for the modern war genre and feel/respond as well as they should, you can look down your laser sights, man stationed turrets, etc… So if you’re into either Battlefield or Modern Warfare, then you should keep your eyes on the latest iteration of Medal of Honor; however, if you’re looking for something new, innovative and different, don’t be surprised if the game doesn’t wow you.  

Medal of Honor is slated to blast into homes on October 12, 2010.