Pearl Harbour 1941. You're the new recruit, fresh from training and eager to get to work, but Pearl is hardly the bustling port it should be. There's a war going on halfway across the world, but you wouldn't know that to look at the place. A beautiful sunny day with clear blue skies and calm seas, sailors lazily soak up the pacific sunshine while others play ball elsewhere; it's paradise. But then, just before you settle back, put your feet up and forget about the bad things happening in Europe, this peaceful scene is shattered. Suddenly the sky fills with dozens of Japanese fighter planes swarming like a plague of bees around a pot of honey, buildings are ripped apart by enormous explosions while those sailors who were just moments ago frolicking about with not a care in the world, are now running for their very lives. Looks like the war has finally caught up with you.

Few games can open with the spectacle of seeing the Pearl Harbour attack in action. Just watching can be quite something, but as ever with Medal of Honor games, you aren't lucky enough to be just a spectator; you have an important role to play. While its heavily scripted nature will no doubt cause a few sighs of disappointment, the sight of seeing a row of battleships having their hulls ripped open by torpedoes metres away from where you are sat never fails to impress. It's just a pity that the pace of this opening level doesn't translate well into some areas of the game.

In a none too drastic change to the series, Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault as the name suggests, transfers itself from the done-to-death European battlefields and adopts the island to island fighting of the Southern Pacific, against the full force of the Japanese empire. Bombed out towns and fighting against Panzer Divisions are out and beautiful tropical jungles and endless bayonet charges are in. While a new host of changes and addition abound, Pacific Assault plays similarly to its many predecessors, with no real big advancements to the series.

It does have a story though and a proper main character who isn't just a name to an avatar. Private Tom Collins takes centre stage here and the game follows his path through some of the major battles of the Pacific. While it does tend to go for the Saving Private Ryan, flag waving, trumpet bellowing, story arc that's so prevalent in American cinema, it at least prevents the kind of abrupt shifts from level to level that's been common is so many recent war based shooters. Told in a semi flashback style, the tale begins in 1943 during the beach assault on the Tarawa Atoll. Knocked out cold by a bomb blast, the game soon shifts to tell Collins' story from his training in America two years earlier, before going through the various battles he partook in after the events in Pearl Harbour, right up until the final attack on Tarawa.

While this particular genre is getting fairly stale with the recent rash of historical based FPS games, Pacific Assault manages to inject some new additions into the mix to keep its head above the water. The change in scenery for one makes it a much more palatable game than much of the competition. Rubble-strewn cityscapes are replaced by prettier looking jungles, complete with tropical climates and beautiful coral seas, making this particular outing feel calmer that its European set brethren; it's almost a shame you have to fill these environments with corpses. Calm though it is at the beginning, it's not long before that gentle stroll down a quiet, peaceful jungle path becomes a desperate, pitched battle for survival.

Action still remains the flavour of the day here, though the pace has been greatly increased since the last Medal of Honour outing. While jungle fighting isn't exactly something new to this genre (see countless Nam based shooters) here at least it's handled in a way that makes battling through the foliage feel more balanced in your favour. Pointless shooting of shrubbery to gun down hidden foes still remains, to an extent, but the game thankfully avoids making the other side more aware of their surroundings than you, avoiding those huge pointless battles against the scenery.

But though the action remains fairly arcade based, it's still manages to be quite hard in places. Going for a more tactical edge, a few new additions make the constant fighting through the hoards of Japanese soldiers a little more difficult than the norm. For starters, Pacific Assault adopts a limit on how many items and weapons can be carried at any one time. Those days of swapping from rifle, to machine gun to rocket launcher are over; now you have to make do with what you're given and when those guns run out of ammo, it's time to scour out new weapons to pilfer. Hardly a groundbreaking innovation, but it works well enough.

Bigger enhancements include a new team play option, a feature just barely covered in Allied Assault. In a nice twist, the men you get partnered with throughout the entire game aren't just a group of nameless, pointless drones who offer nothing but occasional support; instead they are, like Collins himself, characters in the game's story, adding a nice sense of camaraderie into the group. A certain amount of control is also given to order these men around, simplistically enough using the arrow keys. You can order them to attack, cover and suppress, but generally it's a feature that won't become relied upon often.

Even though they do lack specific abilities, they still prove their worth where it counts, with the medic perhaps being the most vital component of the team. And this brings us around to perhaps the biggest change to the series - the way health packs are handled. They still do appear from time to time, but only in certain locations and only if you're lucky. The medic however is always present and one simple call for help will see him glide through the battlefield to patch you up. He'll even keep other team mates fully healed should they fall. Get hit too many times however and rather than keel over and die, you'll fall to the ground, dazed and without the ability to move. Then comes a desperate bid to reach out for help. The medic is the only one who can save you and the only way to get his attention is to keep crying out for assistance. Leave it for too long and the war's over for you sonny; be foolish enough to charge into a group of Japanese soldiers and the only thing you'll see after you get brought down is those soldiers getting ready to finish you off.

While it may seem prudent to call on the medic's assistance for every bump and scrape, he has a limit to the amount of time he can offer help. Once he's out of supplies, well, that's that, you have to survive as best you can. In another nice twist, the harder the difficulty settings, the fewer the supplies for the medic, forcing a more careful approach towards the rampant hoards of enemy soldiers.

Yet these tactical edges don't seem to detract much from the core arcade nature of the game. This is every bit the run and gun action game that Allied Assault was, more so even. Levels tend to vary in terms of overall quality, on occasions battling through dense undergrowth with a group of allied soldiers against mountains of Japanese soldiers can prove to be gratifyingly intense, especially sequences that blend in huge scripted events such as the Pearl Harbour attack, or later an assault on an airfield. In other areas however, levels can come across as repetitive, linear turkey shoots.

In between big spectacular events like the desperate night time defence on Bloody Ridge, there are the levels that space these out. Essentially boiling down to walking from one end of the jungle to the other and gunning down anyone who stands in the way, these levels lack any real excitement. The Pacific environment also hinders variety in locations and while there are attempts to spice things up a little with the occasional weapons depot or village, these sections still lack the punch of earlier expeditions.

The AI also falters in this area. While an improvement over Allied Assault, the AI still fails to provide much of a challenge. Thankfully, friendly team mates are more than capable of handling themselves and do a decent enough job proving cover where it's needed while leaving enough room for you to get on with the game. Enemies however, seem to have suicidal tendencies, literally. It's quite common for Japanese soldiers to bayonet charge for no reason. In some instances this can work quite well, close combat encounters can induce panic as you feverishly decide whether to risk reloading your weapon, or go in close for a bit hand to hand battling. Most of the time however it produces some odd results; a full bayonet charge from halfway across the screen, through a bullet strewn battlefield while you're plugging away round after round into the brave but foolish approaching soldier. Moments like these tend to happen far more often than they should and the end result is usually the same - a non-stop, rampant shooting spree where you simply stand on the spot spraying anything that moves with hot lead.

So when it's bad, Pacific Assault can get be fairly rudimentary, but when it's good the game can be quite excellent. The cinematic styling that has been synonymous with the Medal of Honor series has not been lost here. Hidden objectives and hero moments inject some life into the limp seek and destroy objectives, while occasional and very, very rare vehicular sections also ramp up the fun from the long jungle treks. Scenes of carnage are handled brilliantly, the chaos of a fatal beach assault, or the daylight raid by Japanese aircraft on an airfield, put these sequences together with expertly crafted background sounds and spectacular set-pieces and it makes for some truly memorable gaming moments.

If there was one main criticism however, it would be with the graphics. The game looks nice, highly detailed with some good animations, especially with facial expressions, but it seems a little old for today's masses. A strikingly linear game, Pacific Assault can feel claustrophobic at times, with environments coming across as more corridor based than the huge, wide-open vistas you expect from a game that's set in mainly jungle areas. The incorporated ragdoll physics also feel a little tacked on, with some odd glitches that occasionally send enemy soldiers flying feet up in the air despite only getting shot below the torso. I couldn't help but feel that with more powerful technology behind Pacific Assault, those repetitive run and gun fights could have become some excellent huge scale battles.

The problem with Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault is that it seems to be lacking something; that spark that changes it from a visual spectacle to a classic. Perhaps it's because after countless other games, particularly Call of Duty, those once magnificent scenes of senseless destruction no longer have the impact they once did. Scripted sequences have perhaps gone as far as they can go with these games, Pearl Harbour feels like just another Stalingrad, which itself felt just like another D-Day landing. But as it stands, while it may not live in the memory as long as Allied Assault did when it first graced PC land, Pacific Assault is a good game, marred by one or two flaws that prevent it from attaining the top spot above more deserving competition.

Reviewed by Kieron Giacopazzi for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).