EA's latest iteration of Medal of Honor franchise--Medal of Honor: Airborne--landed on Xbox Live late last week to mixed opinions. Here at the GameSpot AU office, we decided to overcome our fear of heights and see for ourselves what Medal of Honor: Airborne is really made of.

　　The demo--which will cost you 973MB in download--starts you off in an authentic WWII briefing room where you listen to your superior outlining the mission goals and objectives for Operation Husky, which is set in Italy. After that you are taken to the load out screen where you can select your weapons--the load out we choose was a Thompson sub-machine gun, M1 Grand and a colt .45. Then it's off to for another loading screen before jumping out of the plane.

　　There's a brief moment where you are sitting in the plane, being told about the drop zone, but that only lasts a minute. Interestingly, the parachuting mechanic is nothing new to the Medal of Honor franchise, as Medal of Honor Allied Assault: Spearhead featured a parachuting level. Once you jump out of the plane, it's a fairly easy decent, using the left analog stick to control your parachute. Although you can land anywhere on the map, it doesn't really make that much difference to how the level plays out. You still need to take out the AA guns on top of the mansion before moving on to the next objective.

　　The A.I. in Airborne is good, but nothing special. There seems to be an unlimited stream of enemies coming towards you, who are asking to be shot. The enemies will take cover accordingly, peek around the corner and return fire, but they don't seem to do a whole lot more. Once you kill enough of them, they will start to fall back moving into cover as they go. It would have been cool if after that they try to counter-attack you or out maneuver you, but instead they just run back and find more cover. Allied soldiers aren't a whole lot better. Though you can't control any of them, they do decent job of following you around. Occasionally you you'll hear a teammate yell out "follow Boyd" or "machine gun 12 o'clock. Again like the enemy A.I., your allies don't seem to be interested in moving the fight forward, instead they're just happy shooting at the enemy and waiting for you to push forward. When you start to run out of allies, more will just parachute out of the sky to help you.

　　Graphically the demo looks great, as it uses a modified version of the Unreal 3 engine. All of the weapons are beautifully rendered and the character animations are spot on. Unfortunately the environments aren't destructible or even damageable.

　　One thing, that Medal of Honor: Airborne has done well, is the cover system. When your crouched behind a an object, you can peek up form behind cover and shoot, by bringing up your iron sights. When you release the iron sights, Boyd goes back down behind cover. This is a great solution to the problem of using cover that many FPS games face.

　　The Medal of Honor: Airborne demo isn't bad, it's just uninspiring. The parachute mechanic is cool, but it lasts for no more than 30 seconds and isn't particularly challenging. The demo lasts for about 15 minutes and is available on Xbox Live now for both Gold and Silver users.