Medal of Honor: Heroes 2

Right troops, time to dust off your tin hats and tommy guns as we're off to World War 2........again.

Yes that's right, a delve into what seems to be the most popular era for first person shooters, but with a slight twist. Medal of Honor: Heroes 2 wings it way onto the Nintendo Wii, whilst originally penned as a PSP title, it has had a slight makeover and shipped into Shigeru Miyamoto's little white box of joy.

The player takes control of a typical apple pie munching hunk of American patriotism, Lieutenant John Berg, currently enlisted by the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) at around the time of the Battle of Cherbourg. Now I'm sure that the vast majority of you are aware of the Medal of Honour franchise by now so I shall dispense with the pleasantries and get straight into business with what makes this FPS stand out from the rest, the control system.

The use of Wiimote/Nunchuck combo make this title rather a challenge, the Wiimote used for aiming and shooting whatever implement of ranged projectile death you may wield at the time while the Nunchuck is used for your movement controls, forward back strafe left & right and crouch, along with leaning side to side. For those with eagle eyes you may have spotted already that I did not mention that the Nunchuck was used for turning, this is achieved by you "aiming" towards the left and right edges of your screen.

This control method can be cumbersome to get to grips with as you'll be spinning your character and cursing at the screen as you perform your 14th pirouette in your clumsy attempts at turning. But after some practice you'll find that it becomes quite easy to manoeuvre around the battlefield while pulling off some ridiculous shots that would make James Bond jealous. Just one note of caution though, try to avoid prolonged bouts of this game or you'll find that your arms will tire out and fail to function. Trust me on this, I found out the hard way, if at all possible grab a Wii Zapper, if you haven't got one already, to make life easier.

Ok now to the game itself. You have your bog standard single player campaign affair of 7 missions, each broken down into several sub sections so plenty to keep the hands of boredom away, along side this is an arcade mode which turns Medal of Honour: Heroes 2 into a rail shooter, which I might add is rather enjoyable if you're just after a quick 5 minute fix of Gerry bashing.

The arcade mode follows the same missions as the campaign does, also I gathered that I had to play the campaign first in order to unlock the sections for the arcade mode. The graphics for the game aren't anything amazing by today's standards of Crysis or Call of Duty 4, but they do look decent for the Wii considering it is essentially a port from the PSP version and this does show occasionally with some clipping issues, but these are minor issues at best, you still get a decent sensation of immersion in the game which is always good.

Right now if you're reading this in Australia then I'm afraid the following does not apply to you as your Aussie bound versions of this game does not contain multiplayer functionality.

Now to the 32 person multiplayer fun. Before you dive into the action you must first create an EA login, which is free, also does not take much time away before you're blasting away at other people online. We're offered with 3 different flavours of multiplayer action so there should be something to cater for most tastes. Starting with the vanilla flavoured Deathmatch which shouldn't need any explaining to the strawberry flavoured Team Deathmatch, again which shouldn't need explaining then finally onto the Neapolitan Infiltration mode.

Infiltration is basically a capture the flag mode where each side must steal the opposition's flag and return it to the team's base as often as possible. All the servers that were available at the time of testing were consistently full of players so there is no shortage of finding a game , also there were a good deal of servers available at the time of testing too.

The plague of any online gamer is latency and during my time playing I have to report that I did not really encounter any bad bouts of lag or player warp which can only be a good thing. Though I do have to note that while multiplayer can be extremely fun and gratifying, it can also be extremely frustrating as I found at times the Wii controls just didn't hold up to some fast paced DM or TDM, but in general the good outweighs the bad on this occasion.

So there we have it, a consistently fun filled frolic through France as you fight to liberate Cherbourg and stop the Germans from winning the war.........again.