For the Motherland, comrades!
Another new addition is the squad that you have under your command. You don’t have nearly as much control over them as you do in Brothers In Arms, with your orders limited to simple move and scout, hold and recall functions, but they are useful when it comes to laying down some firepower in a big fight. Sadly, they’re not the brightest of fellows and will trail along behind you like lost puppies meaning that if you unwittingly stroll into the enemy’s field of fire your squad mates handily block your retreat back into cover. Of course, this isn’t nearly as annoying as them standing out in the open, right next to you as you take cover and watch them getting riddled… like I said, they’re not the brightest colours in the crayon box.
The stupidity of your squad mates becomes doubly annoying when you realise that they don’t have the ability to heal themselves. You, as the intelligence officer, are obviously the one who has all the medikits… Now you could be an utter sod and let them all get shot to hell, but the problem is that you then get less medikits for the next mission… so you have to carefully balance how often you heal them with how many kits you want to save for yourself against how tough you reckon the next mission is going to be. I ended up leaving my squad behind most of the time and doing the job myself. I’d only call them up when I was either totally outnumbered or it was obvious they wouldn’t get torn to pieces… which kind of negates bothering having a squad at all.
Taking cover in MOH:EA is pretty much essential as you’re not able to take a massive amount of hits before keeling over. Three or four solid hits are enough to see you off, so finding cover and leaning out and shooting from there is the order of the day (which makes those squad mates even more annoying). However, as you pick off soldiers one by one, your new adrenaline bar fills up, presumably because you’re getting more and more pumped over the havoc and carnage you’re causing. Once this is full you can then go into an ‘overboost’ mode where you have unlimited ammo and are invulnerable for a short time. While totally arcadey and completely unrealistic, this mode is quite handy for taking on a load of bad guys at once though it’s best saved for close quarters where the enemy can pop out from around a corner and wipe you out before you know what’s happened.