The acclaimed PC shooter Medal of Honor assaults the console market with Frontline, a thinking man's shooting game that tastefully tackles a very serious subject matter.

The presentation of this game sends a clear message that it is a tribute to the bravery of those who fought in WWII, not a slice of entertainment at their expense. The orchestral music of the options screen is very moving and the mission briefings are intelligent and authentic. The English and German accents are spot on and the names are pulled straight from the history books, as are most of the situations around which the missions are based.

We begin with what must be one of the most controversial choices in gaming history - the storming of Normandy. However, nobody could claim that this glamourises war any more than Saving Private Ryan, as the experience is anything but pleasant. Your boat takes a hit on the way in and as you sink under the water you see all your fellow soldiers fall in and die as machine gun bullets pierce the surface. The beach itself is hell with the sound of gunfire, ricocheting bullets, explosions and dirt falling all around you. The stereo sound effects are amazing and serve to drag you further into the horrifying atmosphere. Your commander instructs you on a series of objectives, the first of which sees you racing across the beach to provide cover fire for trapped comrades, then you must escort an engineer along the shingle bank so he can plant explosives to breach the barbed wire. After this you must run across a minefield, kill the guards in a nearby bunker and use their machine gun to take out the hilltop machine gun nests so the rest of the troops can reach the bunker's entrance. For the whole time all you can hear is gunfire and the screams of soldiers who are being shot and blown up all around you. Thankfully, the designers have wisely opted to not include blood and gore in the game, but even so it is a truly unpleasant experience and perhaps gives us a tiny insight into the kind of horrors the real soldiers faced on the beaches.

The graphics are excellent with imaginative and varied scenery and locations. The story of Patterson, the soldier you play, unfolds alongside the events of the Second World War and you are thrown into various situations and missions that require a range of tactics. After storming the beaches and destroying the machine gun bunkers, you're whisked away to a nearby location where your next mission is to get through a ruined French town and stow away in a U-Boat. Once the boat arrives at a high security shipyard you must destroy it and then sabotage the shipyard. The claustrophobic confines of the U-boat are greatly contrasted against the ruined town you just fought your way through. Another mission sees you in picturesque Holland countryside complete with farm buildings and windmills. Towns are also created with great detail and in one level you make your way along a street by means of back yards, going inside houses and using crawlspaces to get between them. The soliders and civilians are also very impressive with accurate reproductions of uniforms and detailed faces. The animation is also spot on, especially when your enemies die, one man clutching his stomach as he falls to his knees, another spinning and toppling quickly onto his back.

The sound and music also deserve a big mention as they both add as much to the atmosphere as the graphics. Weapons fire, explosions, even footsteps all sound very real and as I mentioned the voice acting and script are of a very high standard. The music meanwhile could have been taken straight from a war film, it is a full orchestral soundtrack that is by turns suspenseful, fast, dramatic and emotional.

The missions involve sabotage, search and rescue, escorting allies, clearing roadblocks, defusing bombs, blowing up boats, trucks and tanks, providing cover for comrades, going undercover into enemy strongholds, making contact with the resistance and much more. Each mission provides several new challenges and it never becomes boring or repetitive. You get to use a wide range of weapons from the era including pistols, grenades, shotguns, sniper rifles and machine guns of various types. You also get to use the enemy's stationery machine guns and cannons against them.

As immersing and engaging as this all is, the fact that you are in a war and killing real people is never far from your mind - the kind of thoughtless fragging that you get in Unreal or Quake is never present here. You know that the Germans, as forceful occupiers, had it coming, but when you're shooting scientists, caterers and engineers that take up arms against you it can feel a bit uncomfortable - still it's war and you must kill or be killed. I am sure that there are some war veterans that are offended by games such as this (and probably films on the same topic) but I am equally sure that some approve of such a game, as long as the subject matter is handled with the respect it deserves. Gaming after all is a form of entertainment just like film and television, but this is a very thought-provoking and strategic shooter where the guns blazing approach isn't appropriate or effective.

The only criticism I would raise is the occasional lapse of quality in the levels - the first example of this was in a level I came across where you are undercover as a caterer at a German mansion, preparing a big function. You must sneak around the mansion to find information and locate an English operative that is being detained somewhere within. However, it is not very easy to walk past other people (bad collision detection) and so there are parts of the level where you simply cannot progress without killing guards that are stood in your way. This normally results in your cover being blown, meaning that you have to shoot your way through the rest of the level. Also, the end of the level sees you jumping off a balcony onto a hay cart below, but you have to push the operative you've rescued over the edge and he falls onto the ground below, missing the cart! He gets up, but even so it's a bit silly and these little faults are annoying. Still, the amount of care, attention to detail, clever design and thought that's gone into the game make these niggles very easy to forgive.

Medal of Honor: Frontline is a long-lasting, challenging shooter with a great variety of missions and locations. It is a thoughtful, strategic game that tackles its subject in the most tasteful manner possible and features such convincing graphics and sound that you really feel like you're in a war zone. It's refreshingly different to all the other shooting games available and well worth your time and money.

Reviewed by Geoff Holland for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).