Medal of Honor Allied Assault Breakthrough is the second expansion pack to the hit WWII first person shooter, Medal of Honor Allied Assault. The second expansion takes the game to Italy and North Africa by courtesy of new developer TKO Software. Was MoH: Breakthrough worth waiting for? Check out the review and find out...

In Breakthrough, you play the role of U.S. Army Sergeant, John Baker. You will join the battle at Kasserine Pass in North Africa, race to capture Messina in Sicily, and finally repel the German army at the historic battle of Monte Battaglia in the heart of Italy. If you played through all of the original MoH: Allied Assault and Spearhead, you won't encounter any surprises here though. The single-player mode is quite frankly disappointing as it is pretty much run and shoot all the way. The only good thing is that TKO's programmers alternate within the same mission first-person shooting action on foot and first-person shooting action in a vehicle.

Like Spearhead, Breakthrough contains three single-player campaigns (11 single-player missions in total), set in Africa, Sicily, and then throughout Italy. You can expect similar objectives like in MoH:AA: destroy a series of AA guns, rescue people, and of course, shoot enemy soldiers. In addition, there are some Jeep mounted machinegun missions, tank-driving missions, demolition missions, bombed out city missions. I found little bug(?) in the game - you can't kill soldiers riding on motorcycles, instead you have to aim for the motorcycles and blow them up. You will probabluy also hate the "invisible walls" preventing you from getting places.

The weaponry is basically the same like in the original game, needless to say that Medal of Honor has a robust selection of weapons. In Breakthrough they've added Carcano rifle, the bomba a mano (an Italian hand grenade), and the Moschetto Automatico Beretta MOD.38A (submachine gun), and also some British weapons such as new British bazooka-style weapon called the PIAT (simple, short-range infantry anti-tank weapon) and Vickers Berthier Mk3b (machine gun with amazing accuracy and power). As before, every weapon in the game is obviously well-optimized and conducts itself realistically during combat.

Multiplayer features 9 new multiplayer levels including the Monastery at Monte Cassino, the streets of Messina, and Anzio Beach and brand new multiplayer Liberation Mode in which defeated players become POWs. In this mode, defeated players must be rescued by surviving teammates to continue the fight. Breakthrough also features popular Tug-of-War and Objective modes.

I really enjoyed the original MoH: Allied Assault (89%), and to a lesser degree, Spearhead (75%). Unfortunately, this second expansion suffers the same problems many 3rd installments usually do, it copies from the previous two and believes more is better.

Overall, Breakthrough is not a new game it's the same game with more levels and some new add-ons. In other word, Breakthrough is another typical EA entry, but this time it truly showed who was behind the game. Right, you still have the MoHAA feel, but let's face it EA is cashing on sequels that are very much minimalist, such a life. Those of you who are merely casual fans of the game, wait until it's under $20. If you're a huge/hard-core fan of the series, you will probably buy it anyway :) If you don't have money right now, wait and pick up Call of Duty (from the makers of Medal of Honor) in November 2003. Here is a playable multiplayer demo (205MB) for MoH: Breakthrough.

System Requirements:
WinAll (except WinNT), Previous installation of Medal of Honor Allied Assault, 733 MHz Intel Pentium III or 700 MHz AMD Athlon processor (1GHz recommended), 128 MB RAM, 8x CD-ROM/DVD-ROM drive, 800 MB HDD free plus space for saved games (additional space required for Windows swap-file and DirectX 8.0 installation), 16 MB (32MB recommended) OpenGL capable video card using an NVIDIA GeForce, ATI Radeon, NVIDIA Riva TNT2, ATI Rage 128 or PowerVR3 Kyro II chipset with OpenGL and DirectX 8.0 compatible driver, DirectX 8.0 compatible sound card, Keyboard, Mouse

*The following 16MB or greater 3D accelerators are not fully supported and do not work properly with the game: 3Dfx Voodoo 3/4/5 (no intro movies play+various textures are corrupted), 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee cards, Matrox G400 and G450 (Frame rate is often below 10FPS even at the lowest video settings), Nvidia Vanta (too slow).