Pacific Assault puts you in the shoes of Tommy Conlin, a new Marine in the Pacific Theater. You start at the Battle of Tarawa Atoll where you flash back to your boot camp days and essentially work your way back to present events. After the standard this-is-how-you-move, this-is-how-you-shoot training that could also be easily accomplished by setting up your keys in the options menu, you're off to Pearl Harbor. Tommy arrives at the Hawaii base just as the attack begins and the game kicks everything into high gear. After battling down a pier, taking over a heavy gun on a PT boat, boarding a sinking ship and destroying Japanese planes, could the game possibly get any better than this? Unfortunately, not really.

Medal of Honor is a frustrating game to play because you can see the excellent production values that went into it, but actually playing it is disappointing. After the huge battle of Pearl Harbor, Tommy is shipped off to island-hop in the endless jungles of the South Pacific, and this is where the game begins to falter. While on different islands, you are basically tasked with the same objective, find something; destroy it, repeat until completed. Adding to the repetitive nature of your objectives is the repetitive nature of combat. Usually you find yourself walking through a beautifully rendered jungle occasionally stumbling upon small villages filled with Japanese soldiers.

These soldiers swarm your unit's position and, once taken care of, will respawn either covertly inside buildings you've already cleared or directly in front of you. Things like this really take you out of the realistic nature of the game. Sometimes you will take up stationary artillery (usually a mini-gun to mow down advancing enemies) but your squad mates, who should be watching your back, will sit around while you are bayoneted in the back screaming things like "Get him, Tommy" or "Fall Back." Those phrases are a bit different than the ones I was screaming.

For the most part, the members of your squad are intelligent enough to hold their own. Being aided by the game's increasingly cheap AI, they are able to spot enemies and shoot at them hundreds of yards away. A lot has been said about the game's questionable AI in some parts (especially snipers sitting in trees who don't spawn until triggered) and this may be one of the downfalls of using a scripted system to progress the action. Sometimes the game requires you to hit an exact point on the map or your comrades will hold position until you find that sweet spot. In some levels (like inside the West Virginia at Pearl Harbor) you are instructed to find a certain trigger point in a certain time limit. Whether it is because of poor level design or a simple lack of any direction, trial and error usually becomes the name of the game.

Graphics wise Pacific Assault is a gorgeous game to look at, even in lower resolutions. During the Pearl Harbor mission the surroundings look so excellent you could swear you were looking at photos of the actually base. Character models also look and animated very well, but there are still some lip-syncing problems here and there. Unfortunately, the game's awesome graphics are also one of its downfalls as performance certainly suffers even on systems reaching the minimum system requirements. Testing the game on an Athlon XP 1700+ (1.47GHz) with a Radeon 9600PRO I had my fair share of slow down and stuttering, but tweaking settings here and there allowed me to get acceptable performance out of the game. The engine itself not only suffers from high system requirements, but it also sports some dodgy collision detection. When surveying through the jungle missions you will get caught up on the environment more than a few times.

Sound is the only aspect of the game that doesn't promise more than it can deliver. The wonderfully orchestrated score fits in perfectly with the rest of the game and really draws you into the action. Sound effects are also exceptionally done with weapons sounding different and the buzzing of zeros over your head is striking realistic. Voice acting is great although the lip-syncing problems and curious rendering of the character's tongues leads to some "interesting" situations.

As you can see I'm in the middle of my own frustration. The die-hard gamer inside of me sees a game that sports some of the most important events in American history, and allows me to play them out. The reviewer inside me sees a game that could be so much more, and should be so much more, but ultimately fails to deliver the experience I was expecting when I first booted the game up. Pacific Assault's cut scenes and story are intriguing to follow and coupled with the aforementioned production values really makes for an engaging tale, yet the game really starts to grind on you with crippling load times, endless jungles, questionable level design, and the feeling that you've been here and done that.

While this won't be the last game to carry the Medal of Honor banner, one can only hope that the lessons learned in the past two incarnations will make the next game the best one produced and trump Activision's excellent Call of Duty franchise for the ruler of WWII-scripted shooters.