Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond will be releasing later this year on Oculus devices. The game will be developed by Respawn Entertainment, known for creating the Titanfall series and Apex Legends. This will be the development team’s first time working with the Medal of Honor series.
Medal of Honor is a long-lived franchise that’s traded hands many times since its inception in 1999. The first game in the series was developed by DreamWorks Entertainment and had a story created by none other than Steven Spielberg. Since this first game, a myriad of other developers, including EA Los Angeles and Danger Close Games, have gotten their own shot at making a Medal of Honor game. While most of the series took place during World War II, later entries shifted the focus to more modern conflicts. The most recent Medal of Honor game, Medal of Honor: Warfighter, was released in 2012.
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Respawn’s new revival of the franchise returns it to its WWII roots while still taking it in a whole new direction. Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond was officially announced at Gamescom today by Oculus, with a two-minute-long story trailer that showed off some of the title’s new VR capabilities. Above and Beyond casts players as a member of the Office of Strategic Services, undertaking covert operations to sabotage the Nazi war effort and aid in the French resistance. In addition to shooting Nazis, as can be expected from a Medal of Honor title, players will be interacting with the environment in new ways made available by VR technology. The trailer showed the player tapping piano keys to open a secret passage, dropping a stone bust on an enemy’s head, and catching a gun out of midair just in time to slam it into a Nazi’s face in a sequence that looked straight out of an Indiana Jones film. Check out the trailer below.
VR technology hasn’t quite exploded the way people thought it might. There have certainly been some excellent VR titles released in recent years; Half-Life Alyx springs readily to mind. But by and large, the technology just isn’t associated with the deep experiences that traditional games can provide. Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond might help change that. The trailer indicated a very involved campaign, with fully voiced characters and action-packed cutscenes. Unfortunately, the game is exclusive to Oculus devices, which is a major disappointment to gamers who were stung by the recent announcement that the VR headsets will soon require a Facebook account for players to sign in.
Setting aside the faults of Oculus, Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond looks like a truly impressive title. VR games with this much polish don’t come around too often, and when they do, they’re definitely worth noticing. With the release of Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond by the end of this year, the new VR title will take the long-running series back to its Nazi-fighting roots, with a whole new perspective.
Source: Oculus/YouTube
