Monty vs Rommel
The biggest change to the MOH series brought in by European Assault is in the levels themselves. Before, the game was pretty confined, forcing you to go in a particular direction but now the levels are much more open allowing you to pick your own route to an objective. Now, instead of having unscalable walls or strangely insurmountable strands of barbed wire hemming you in, you can go pretty much where you like. There are boundaries of course but you’d have to be particularly pedantic to want to go off purely to find them… I did, but that’s my job!
This more open structure gives a more satisfying playing experience as you can use your new found freedom to good, or bad, effect. In assaulting an enemy held village, you could work your way steadily from house to house, starting at the edge or you could chance the hail of fire and take out the house with a machine gun nest in it and then turn the gun on the enemy, the choice is yours. Be warned though, work your way too far in without mopping up behind you and you’ll find yourself isolated with enemy troops closing in from all sides.
MOH is renowned for the scripted scenes triggered in game and though the gameplay is much more open than previous games, you’re still funnelled to a particular point to set of the next bit of the action. This is no bad thing as these are usually your primary objective anyway, so you’ll hardly notice it and the free nature of the play adds some replayability value to the game.
Another reason to go back again is in the secret secondary objectives that you uncover as you play a mission. In a nice touch, and as I guess real conflict is like, secondary objectives may reveal themselves as you go along. It’s quite possible to complete many of the levels without uncovering these, but the open levels encourage exploration so it’s worth taking the time to check in that foxhole or riffle through discarded papers. This more realistic approach is dulled a little by the inclusion of what I can only call the ‘End of Level Boss’ you encounter as a result of the secondary objectives, which seem to always force you to take out one enemy in particular. These guys can take a serious pummelling, totally wiping out any realism provided by the previous open, free-form nature of the level you’ve just played through.