Hands-On Review--MoHAA Breakthrough vs Call of Duty

Both 3D games were brought to the Mac by Aspyr Media, Inc. Medal of Honor Allied Assault is the oldest of the two but its Breakthrough expansion pack just arrived for the Mac within the last couple of weeks. Call of Duty came out just over a month ago. They are state of the art for first person shooters (FPS) on the Mac and the theme of both is World War II.

When we played MoHAA with a pre-release version of the Spearhead expansion pack at last years Apple WWDC, our favorite FPS then was Return to Castle Wolfenstein (which had earlier displaced Unreal Tournament and Quake III Arena). We immediately picked up MoHAA and the Spearhead expansion when it came out and it became our favorite FPS for nearly a year. We were introduced to Call of Duty by a friend who claimed it was far superior to the MoHAA series. We thoroughly enjoyed it and quickly bought our own copy.

We only play the on-line multiplayer (MP) versions after learning the controls and maps with a bit of play in single player (SP) mode. We also mostly play the Team Deathmatch game type, although we've played some of each type, including Breakthrough's new Liberation game type. So our comments are on the multiplayer versions from on-line play of mostly the Team Deathmatch game type. Our game rig is an original dual 2.0-GHz Power Mac G5 with the stock ATI Radeon 9600 Pro (our retail version 9800 Pro gave up the ghost 6 weeks ago), 23" HD Apple Display and 1.5GB RAM being fed by cable internet. We're running Mac OS X 10.3.4. We run the games at 1024x768 resolution to keep the frame rate up but go for most of the eye candy: 32 bit color, medium texture, decals, weather, texture compression. We also use RadeonEnabler 1.1 and ATI Displays v4.2.5 to set the OEM graphics card to 2x FSAA and 2x anisotropic filtering.

With Breakthough, one can play all the original MoHAA and Spearhead expansion pack maps as well as the new maps added in the Breakthough expansion pack--11 in SP mode and 9 in MP mode. The new maps are of North African and Italian scenes. Italian skins are new and there are a few new skins among American, British, German and Russian soldiers as well but the underlying computer model is or seems the same. Breakthough has italian weapons and also has new vehicles in SP mode. A new game style, Liberation, is included. Fast running, which we like, is a built-in server option rather than a mod. Without fast running, movement in the MoHAA series seems like one is slogging through molasses or deep sand.

While we've played Breakthrough for a week, we still haven't played all of the new maps since there are few Breakthough servers and they also cycle through the previous maps as well as the new ones. We've played over half the new maps: Kasserine, Bizerte, Tunisia, Bologna, Palermo and Monte Battaglia. Among them, the street fight in Bologna is our favorite--it is a little more complex than the Tunisia and Palermo maps. Monte Battaglia would give Bologna some serious competition for our favorite if it weren't flawed, at least on most servers, with at least two places where one can walk through the scene's boundaries--one entrance to the tunnel under the lift annd the other outside the main wall.

In the new Liberation game style, when one gets "killed" one is imprisioned in the opponents jail until freed by a team member or the game ends with one entire team jailed. We found this to be a very boring game style, like freeze tag or rounds.

Breakthrough also seems to have a video flaw or at least a dramatic change from Spearhead that we don't like. When playing the original MoHAA and Spearhead maps via Breakthrough, they appear to be much hazier and distance visibility is significantly reduced in some maps. The difference is easy to see if one switches back and forth between Breakthrough and Spearhead on the same server playing the same game with the same graphics settings. It is most noticeable to us when playing the Flugenhagen map where we have "perfected" play with the sniper rifle. We tried turning off weather effects and ATI Displays OpenGL 3D overrides but the haze effect and reduced distance visibility remained.

The really good thing about Breakthrough is that if one is bored with the Spearhead map set, one gets 9 additional maps to master. There are also very few instances of immature jerks who intentionally kill team mates. Unfortunately, the cheats that are increasingly taking the fun out of MoHAA Spearhead, despite server claims to the contrary, also appear to work in Breakthrough.

Call of Duty (CoD) is essentially the same game as MoHAA. However, the player models are much more realistic in our opinion. The uniforms (skins) are not customizable as in MoHAA but the models move more realistically and have 3 positions (standing, crouching or prone) rather than 2. We really like the prone position in CoD that is not available in MoHAA. The accuracy of all weapons in CoD is related the player's position and speed of movement and is the highest when in the prone position.

CoDs maps are as good as or better than those of MoHAA. Action is much faster in CoD while the MoHAA maps are much more conducive to sniping. Fortunately, there are fewer if any cheats yet for CoD so play is much more fun.

The biggest problem with CoD is that most of the servers have friendly fire turned on and they are frequented by immature "children" who engage in massive team member killing for attention instead of choosing a free for all game style and competing equitably. There are far fewer CoD servers than for MoHAA, another disadvantage.

All considered, Call of Duty is the better WWII-themed first person shooter 3D game in our opinion. But both keep our aging (hence slowing) reflexes exercised.