Graphics: Pacific Assault uses a proprietary engine to produce all of its visuals and does its job magnificently. All the latest eye candy is included, but you have to own a fairly robust machine to enable everything without paying a high price in performance. You spend a lot of time in the jungle and those complex worlds are lush and realistic, right down to the way the foliage moves abruptly when there’s an explosion. In other nice touches, smoke and mist have a very real effect on what you can see and how far away you can see it, water reflects the surrounding scenery in fractured pieces, and your vision blurs momentarily if you hold the trigger of a machine gun instead of taking metered bursts the way you were trained. Character models are highly detailed and do a good job of moving their lips in time with the words that are supposed to be coming out of them. The physics modeling lets you send enemies flying, or forces them to do a small back flip if you clip them in the head with a powerful bullet. In-game cinematics switch between pre-rendered and game-rendered cutscenes. The engine does a respectable job of creating cutscenes between missions, but the pre-rendered movies that start each new campaign are a real treat. They’re highly polished and have an amazing sense of depth. The singular issue aside from the stern system requirements for high detail at a usable speed is some minor clipping issues.

Interface: Pacific Assault‘s interface is well organized and allows for control over detail settings and other performance aspects of the game that we’ve come to expect from the best first-person shooters. The only real disappointment is that major video and audio settings, like sound processing type and video resolution, are only presented before the program loads. If you want to change the resolution or enable EAX, you have to quit and restart. While these settings are seldom changed after the first couple of start-ups, it would have been appreciated to be able to tweak things like resolution on the fly, especially since the game has stiff hardware requirements. It’s easy to over-judge what your system is capable of when starting out and then have to make a change to correct the problems that choice creates.

Inside the title you’re presented with the traditional FPS standard: health meter, compass, crosshairs, and ammo supply indicator. It’s simple, but it gives all the information that’s necessary. The default controls are also traditional, but they’re fully remappable if personal preference defies convention.

Gameplay: One of the things that established Medal of Honor was its frenzied battles that accurately conveyed the confusion of war, but managed to be engrossing and entertaining at the same time. Pacific Assault keeps up the fury and in some cases builds on it. There are certain battles that are complete bedlam, making the beach landing at Normandy in Medal of Honor: Allied Assault look like a day at the beach. There are a lot of FPS releases that claim that firing from cover is important, but Pacific Assault really means it. Don’t expect to rush into the open and start firing. You can do that, but you’ll end up face down over a rock.

Pacific Assault‘s greatest asset is that it creates a believable environment. Aside from the visuals as discussed above and the sound as discussed in the “Sound FX” section below, Pacific Assault sprinkles in other nods to realism that help pull you into the game. Calling the corpsman is nice twist on health regeneration, even though it can be tough to get help in heavy battles as opposed to dropped health packs. The “verge of death” period where your vision grays out and sounds echo in your ears is also an appreciated touch, especially as you wait to see if it’s a corpsman that comes to your side, or an enemy soldier with a chip on his shoulder and a gun in his hand. Corpsmen are also unnecessary if you pass out in the water because you will instantly drown.

While you can use any of the emplaced weapons, none of Pacific Assault‘s vehicles are drivable. The one exception to that rule is a series of missions about half-way through the game where you take to the cockpit of an Allied fighter plane when the pilot jettisons on you. It’s a nice break from the vantage points occupied in the normal course of events, and it’s a lot of fun as well. The regular first-person controls don’t do any favors in the plane, and actually complicate maneuvering around until you acclimatize, but once you get the hang of it, these missions take on a life of their own.

The only major distraction from all the goodness in Pacific Assault is its unmercifully long load times when the program starts up, when levels load, and before cutscenes play. In some spots it can take over a minute to get to where you can play in either single- or multiplayer. These long load times also seem to be hardware agnostic, and throwing more machine at it doesn’t make things go appreciably faster. If they’re going to be releasing patches for this title, I hope this is one of the first items on the list.

Multiplayer: Multiplayer matches in Pacific Assault are set up over a LAN or via the Internet using an integrated version of the GameSpy browser. If you’re heading out onto the Internet for some action, Pacific Assault has a handy feature of a quick match. It randomly selects a publicly available session and all you have to do is click to join. You can also browse all current matches and choose one that suits your exact interests. Online performance is hit-and-miss. Some servers with a low ping time suffer from lag, while others nearing the 32-player maximum and reporting questionable ping times run as smooth as silk.

Pacific Assault has three multiplayer types: Free-for-All, Team Deathmatch, and Invader. The first two modes are traditions in FPS offerings, so the real interest is in the last match type. Invader pits two teams, Axis and Allies, against one another with the attacking team trying to achieve a series of goals needed for the win. Invader is a blast, putting you to work as the attacker to do things like blow up a bridge, steal enemy plans, or occupy an installation. The maps are designed so that all weapon types are equally useful and neither snipers nor heavy machine gunners have a disproportionate advantage. Out-of-the-box there’s also a good variety of maps, but the mod community should also be able to add value here, as they so often do.

Sound FX: Sound effects in the original Medal of Honor were a highlight of the game and Pacific Assault continues that tradition. Bullets whiz, explosions deafen, and war machines rumble. The aural atmosphere is always thick with detail in both the foreground and background, increasing the player’s involvement. Battles can get confusing, but the cacophony of a million things happening at once is well executed and doesn’t overwhelm so much as it immerses – a fine line to walk. Voice work is excellent and convincing, even though some phrases get tiresome as they’re repeated by your squadmates too often in battle.

Musical Score: Pacific Assault‘s musical score is superb. Its 10 compositions are heroic, thoughtful, and compelling, befitting the subject matter. It’s also a nice touch that the sound track was broken out in the Director’s Edition DVD, because listening to the pieces separate from the fevered action of the game gives you a different understanding of the artistry that went into their creation.

Intelligence & Difficulty: As I mentioned earlier, the computer AI puts up quite an effective and varied fight: It’s not perfect, but computerized adversaries do keep you on your toes. The most notable AI shortcomings are actually on the friendly side. The biggest problem they create is that they always seem to get under foot. They’re wholly competent in a fight and many times will save your skin, but there’s also a lot of colliding with them, especially in tight corridors. Friendly forces also have a bad habit of running in front of you when you’re firing. They don’t die from it, but hitting your own guys wastes precious ammunition and keeps the enemy alive and shooting.

Pacific Assault has four difficulty levels: Easy, Medium, Hard, and Realistic. Graduating up the line seems to make you take more damage per shot, so you have to be more cautious when you move. The Hard difficulty adds bleeding out with major injury and Realistic ups the ante by removing all on-screen displays including health, ammo and crosshairs. I consider myself to be a fairly weathered veteran of the first-person genre, and I found the default difficulty level to provide plenty of challenge, but higher levels are there to give you something for which to aspire.

Overall: Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault picks up on all the good things that Medal of Honor: Allied Assault started and builds on them. It’s got frenzied action, a thoughtful storyline, and gameplay that will swallow you whole. If you enjoyed Allied Assault, you should be storming your local software retailer to get a copy.