It seems like we cannot go a month without at least one World War II first person shooter hitting the shelves these days, be it Call of Duty 15, Medal of Honour Assault Somewhere Or Other or Wolfenstein 4D. It no doubt has already reached the point where if you were to play all these games back to back, it would take longer than the actual war lasted, while all the online modes of these myriad titles have taken up hundreds of thousands of hours of online gaming. Now here comes another one - Medal of Honor: Airborne is dropping in from above for a surprise strike!

To be fair to the developers, making a game does cost a huge amount of money and taking risks with yours or other people's money doesn't go down well if you lose. First person shooters are known to do well and World War II games are known to sell well (look up the Call of Duty sales if you doubt me) so it's no wonder that the publishers keep churning them out. What is more, the fact that they keep selling so well means that clearly they're still in demand with the gaming public. The recent change of Call of Duty to the present day with the forthcoming Modern Warfare however is beginning to suggest that we may be coming to an end of this obsession with six years of (albeit important) history.

So, given the sheer number of first person shooters on the market right now (I have not finished one for years, since every time I get near to the end, another four or five get released!) and the number coming out in the ever nearer Christmas rush, what makes Electronics Arts think we need another? More importantly, what is there here to make you fork out your hard earned cash?

MoH Airborne puts you in the role of a Private in the 82nd Airborne one of the regiments that jumped out on D-day with the 101st Airborne, who you have no doubt come across on the TV series Band of Brothers. The Airborne divisions were elites of the American infantry, being volunteers rather than conscripts - better trained, better paid ($50 dollars a month more!) and filtered by a rigorous training regime that forced the less able to drop out. You jump into some of the most dangerous conflicts in the war; these units had extremely high casualty rates, even with their training, so the setting is very exciting and intense.

It is also gorgeous. Each building has been carefully constructed and rendered; the detail is astonishing as is the quality of lighting and the textures. The missions are a mixture of day and night, set in various areas across Europe. They all look fantastic and the settings have been exploited for all they are worth. Bombed out buildings with scattered furniture and rubble, church bells hanging loose in ruined towers, paintings and photographs lying smashed on the floor and burnt out cars set a tremendous atmosphere for the gameplay. The enemies are fantastically animated, as are the weapons, while the shouting between soldiers gives a constant absorbing din that makes you really feel like you are in the middle of a warzone. The sound effects are second to none; again, the attention to detail is stunning, right down to the sounds of different types of rubble under your feet. Add to this an inspiring orchestral score that would befit any war movie and you have a spectacular setting for the game to take place in. When it comes to the visuals and the audio, MoH Airborne is as good as any other out there at the his moment and I am truly impressed at how well it runs - no stuttering frame rates like in Lost Planet, where even the best PC struggles for such disappointing results.

Single player consists of only six missions, but each effectively consists of a large (and I mean large) map that is multileveled and all urban, so packed with buildings, every room of which is accessible. You start off, and respawn after dying, by jumping from a transport plane. You then guide yourself down using simple chute controls to the point of your choice. That is if you make it: some of the drops are particularly windy and the controls are very subtle. You also have to make a safe landing; hit something or fail to adopt the right posture (by pressing space) and you will collapse to the ground, a sitting duck for the enemy as you struggle to untangle yourself from your chute.

Apart from the spectacle of gliding down to the terrain below, with a stunning aerial view as the landscape scales larger and larger, you can land anywhere you want and start the mission from literally any point - a very clever and revolutionary feature in a genre that's just crying out for new ideas. This freedom of starting position then leads into further freedoms when playing; as mentioned, every room in every building is accessible, as are most of the rooftops - so you can move any way you choose around any obstacle, take cover wherever you are and pretty much adopt the fighting style of your choice. On top of this, you can use a vast range of weaponry that you select before you start the mission. Additionally you can grab any enemy weaponry that is dropped and even start later missions with German guns.

On each of these maps, the possible variations is enormous - almost limitless - making for an unprecedented level of freedom. Even though the actual campaign is short, the variety and possibility of replays will bring you back to the game again and again, because the experience is never the same twice. You do not have to follow a set path that the developer drives you on, as with every other first person shooter. Occasionally this can become disconcerting if you cannot find your targets or you get stuck temporarily, because the options are not made clear to you; you have to find your own way. But even at this times isn't not infuriating, but rather engenders a feeling of challenge as you explore ruined buildings and devastated streets.

These streets don't just give you freedom either; they also provide fantastic tactical challenges. There are snipers above you on elevated ledges and heavily guarded camps that can be impassable from the front but with a plethora of ways to assault them. You can take the high ground yourself and pick the enemy off from above or find a weak point in the back or side; the possibilities are endless. In every region there are a set number of missions that can be attempted in any order and in any way. After completing all these, there's a routine in each case of a final step where you have to defend from an enemy counterattack or secure your escape route. Unfortunately the game is let down here, because these segments have the feel of a set piece, designed to provide a challenge but played out in one way only. For example, in two missions you are confronted by a counterattack led by a Tiger tank. These are at the end of street with no room to manoeuvre in and the tanks themselves are static, so there is no ebb and flow of combat and just the one basic means of attack. These kind of represent a final boss fight, hearkening back to the older days of gaming.

I feel that these detract from the gameplay experience in most of the missions though and in the later missions I found them infuriating; they have intentionally been made difficult to give a rather forced endgame battle. However, this was not achieved by making the enemy tactically savvy or putting you in the midst of a massive assault. Instead, you're faced with unassailable terrain with every route under machine gun or rocket fire and you just have to hope and run, respawning time and again to attack the same segment because you cannot save. Or by making the enemy ridiculously powerful: one elite SS trooper took seven point blank shotgun blasts to the face to kill in the last mission. Even so, the AI of this unit was poor, so it was not difficult to kill him. I ran around a column, shot him from behind, so he turned around and then ran around the other way. Appallingly I was able to do this all seven times and killed him without him even firing a round! The last mission itself has you dropping down onto a ruined tower that is damaged such that you are limited in progress by the rubble and there are not many options, unlike the previous missions. It feels like the developers were forced to remove all the wonderful special features in later segments, because they made it too easy rather than spending more time on intelligent level designs to achieve the same end - perhaps time constraints made them take the easy way out.

The other flaw is the AI of you fellow paratroopers. They never assist you but instead carry on with their own thing, which is generally running into enemy fire and getting killed. They do not even fight well together and try to take on armies single-handedly. This gives the game a "one man against the world" feeling and consequently you do not feel like a member of an elite fighting force, but rather a solitary hunter stalking the battlefield. This and the endgame segments detract from the realism and freedom that have been implemented so well throughout the rest of the game.

MoH Airborne seems primarily geared towards the single player experience. There is a multiplayer option and it can be very enjoyable, but after having played a number of matches it becomes clear that this is more of an add-on to a single player game than a standalone segment. The multiplayer maps are the same as seen in the single player game but the balancing has not been carefully addressed. If you play as the allies, you spawn in by parachute as in single player, while the Axis players spawn at preset points. This gives the Allies a major tactical advantage and it becomes very easy for them to jump in at critical locations and snipe you from afar. However, the gameplay does benefit from the three dimensional nature of single player, with multi-storied buildings giving a great tactical depth. These maps pose one problem though and that is the sheer size is too great for the number of players; you can spend several minutes wandering around looking for an opponent and it would have made sense to use smaller sections of the maps in multiplayer, offering more range and variety, or even better still, brand new layouts tailored specifically towards multiplayer action.

Despite a couple of weakness, Medal of Honor: Airborne is a game that stands out in a market full of generic by-the-numbers money spinners. This is the most original first person shooter I have come across since Doom 3's blend of horror and action. As such I highly recommend it, but with a warning attached; EA strove for perfection but have just overshot the mark, trying too hard and overworking a brilliant concept into a merely good game, and one that is far better in single player than it is online.

Reviewed by Gavin Udall for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).