Fortunately, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, designed by 2015 Studios and published by EA, delivers on this promise and then some. With six different theatres of action spanning across more than 30 separate levels, Medal of Honor manages to mix fast, run-and-gun battles with tense moments of guile and trickery, delivering a satisfying title that feels like it’s over far too soon after only 10 to 12 hours.

But boy, those 10-to-12 hours are entertaining while they last. The player takes on the role of Lt. Mike Powell, a particularly keen Army Ranger who apparently likes to volunteer for the most dangerous and complicated missions available, which pretty much summarizes the entire back-story of the game. Instead of building any kind of storyline, Medal of Honor frames itself entirely in the actual events of the war. So, rather than a secret battle outside the war, like the one fought in Return to Castle Wolfenstein, players instead find themselves sunk knee-deep in the conflict, fighting room to room through houses in the French countryside or ducking low in the water to keep from being cut to shreds as they approach the shoal on Omaha Beach.

This gives the game a bit of a segmented feel, but it succeeds well due to the smooth flow of each particular mission into the next, and the scripted events that help the individual missions move along. The Normandy Beach sequence is almost completely dominated by in-game cut scenes, which just happen to re-create (down to the word, if I’m not mistaken) the first 24 minutes of Saving Private Ryan. The player can look around their Higgins boat as it approaches the beach and watch their fellow soldiers nervously tinker with their guns, utter quiet prayers and listen to their commanding officer shout last-minute orders before they arrive at the shoreline. As the player advances up the beach and hustles from one obstacle to another, they can look back over their shoulder and realize that they’re actually leading a charge, with soldiers dodging and juking behind them, some falling to machine gun fire, others sailing into the air after hitting mines.

This kind of detail is everywhere in Medal of Honor, both in the non-player characters and the environments in which they fight. Squad mates will actually find cover and squat behind it, scanning the area around them for danger and firing on it when they can. Medics will move from soldier to soldier, administering first aid. Enemies will abandon covered targets and concentrate their fire on easier prey, flee from grenades, and take up a heavy machine gun if their comrades fall. Meanwhile, the maps are logical and atmospheric, and only once or twice is Medal of Honor guilty of turning a simple house into a maze for the sake of drawing out the length of the level. Towns are almost nerve-wracking for all the little cubbyholes that could hide snipers, and bunkers are appropriately winding and dangerous.

Environmental effects are used well, too, including a soft pattering rain that makes a French hamlet packed with German riflemen all the more unnerving, and the gloomy fogginess of the German forest in deep winter. Medal of Honor pulls everything it can out of the Quake III engine, and while there are occasionally a few flat textures — most notably tree branches that stick out like they were cut from cardboard — the game comes off looking beautiful, or at least as beautiful as a blasted-out WWII palette can be. The sound is put to good use as well, with authentic-sounding weapon fire and an occasional well-researched touch, like the noteworthy "ping" of an exhausted M1 clip. The Michael Giacchino score also supplies an adventurous and occasionally grim tone to highlight the action, giving the game more of an Indiana Jones and less of a Big Red One kind of feel.

This isn’t inappropriate, because at the heart of Medal of Honor is a fast, run-and-gun style of gameplay that doesn’t dwell too long on ugly realism. Those hoping to see Rainbow Six in a WWII context will have to wait for another day, because while the atmosphere feels genuine, Medal of Honor’s doesn’t do anything to discourage you from thinking you could take out an entire German beachhead all by yourself.

All of this said, Medal of Honor still has its shortcomings. While the scripting for the non-players and enemies makes them lots of fun to watch, the AI can occasionally make them hilarious to fight. The Wermacht have a habit of blowing each other up with badly-thrown grenades, and while they’ll gun you down without mercy if you walk too close to them, they’re perfectly content to stand perfectly still while their comrades are being picked off by your sniper rifle from a distance. Also, while Medal of Honor is busy pulling everything it can out of the Quake III engine, the Quake III engine is busy doing the same thing to your computer. My machine occasionally had some serious slowdowns on the medium graphics settings and default resolution, so those running on the bottom end of the minimum requirements might want to think twice.

Still, these flaws do little to subtract from what is truly a great game. Medal of Honor does an excellent job with a tricky subject, and manages to capture the atmosphere of the Second World War without smothering the gameplay with its gravity. Players who make it through to the end of the game will feel a rewarding sense of accomplishment, and thanks to the excellently scripted events throughout the game (including one right before the end that’s a clever little tribute to Half-Life), they’ll feel as though they’ve survived some fairly momentous circumstances. It’s definitely a title worth picking up for any FPS fan, and particularly those who want a chance to taste what it might be like to have charged up the beaches at Normandy.