An ammunition bunker in Kasserine Pass.

We go from Kasserine Pass (Tunisia) to take stopovers at Bizerte (Tunisia), Sicily (Italy), Monte Cassino (Italy), Anzio (Italy) and finally Monte Battaglia (Italy). This provides us with a wide range of environments from desert to trees and vineyards. Part of the tweaking has been new weather effects to facilitate rain, sandstorms and thick fog. All in all we get some quite nice vistas to fight in although none of them are quite as famous or landmark as the Bocage or Omaha Beach missions in the first game. Each mission set presents a different environment to navigate with the sandstorm being the most novel. The thrill of working your way through an area you can barely see and accidentally stumbling across troopers or worse yet hostile tanks sets an excellent change of pace for the expansion pack.

Here you have to make it across the river.
Naturally while being shot at the whole way.

Interspersed amongst all the missions on foot are vehicle sequences where you either man a gun on a jeep or use an armoured railcar - something that brings 'on the rails' shooting segments in FPS games back to their literal roots. Vehicle handling is a little clunky with corners being taken sharply and general jerkiness to the suspension. This brings us to the first bad aspect of the pack - these on the rails segments are not a lot of fun. They involve repetitious learning of where the enemy is going to attack you and fighting the vehicle handling to get a decent aim on them in time. On harder difficulty levels the whole thing becomes an exercise in pain. While we can understand the need to break up the fighting with something a little different these segments are rapidly becoming the next great FPS cliche. It wouldn't be so bad if the odds arrayed against you weren't so overwhelmingly massive that you could legitimately react to events rather than simply engaging in rote learning between succesive quicksaves.

Stealth time. Here we are sneaking onto a ship
which we will steal papers from and sink.

Fortunately the on foot fighting, bar the very last mission of the pack, is a joy with the fairly solid AI of the original game here again. Troopers will retreat, flank you, throw grenades and generally make your life difficult. Best of all while they can see through foiliage unnaturally well they can't see through more solid objects and it is possible to outflank them - especially while they are engaged attacking the friendly troopers in the region. Another tweak, presumably aiming this pack for the veteran Medal player, is that the bullet count for your guns can be desperately low on some missions. It isn't uncommon to run out for a certain style of gun and need to use less suited weaponry for a while - one tense section had us using just a pistol till we could secure more ammunition. As a general tip we strongly suggest, when playing the pack, that you take full advantage of the various fixed guns available as much as possible to conserve the ammunition you carry with you. This becomes especially important in the climactic final missions where you repeatedly get jumped by large numbers of troopers and it is important to conserve ammunition a bit to deal with this. Combine that with a very annoying on the rails shooter segment which, after some on foot fighting, segues into a sniper tower defense and the final mission oddly goes out on an aggrivating whimper - which is a shame as getting there was a lot of fun.

A shortly to be dead trooper.

Other oddities is that the registration software EA uses has no entry for New Zealand - it seems a little remiss to be selling software in a country and not actually have that country available in your registration process. There also is a note that Audigy card owners are unable to use 3D hardware sound. This puzzles us because aside from some console and ini file editing you couldn't enable hardware sound in the first game let alone this expansion pack. The default has always been using a 2D miles fast sound so exactly why this mentioned in the readme notes is unclear. This might explain the occasional lockups we experienced playing - lockups that again the first game didn't suffer from.

Contacting Klaus we get ready to sneak through Bizerte.

Multi-player has also received a tweak or three with some new maps to play and a new game mode - Liberation. Quake players will recognise the gameplay style as it functions like a team deathmatch only that dead comrades are placed in jail rather than respawning and must be 'liberated' by a fellow teammate from the enemy base. Effectively a World War II style freeze quake game mode. It is a nice addition and works well to the theme of World War II action. More problematic is finding a server running this mode as it seems Breakthrough hasn't yet percolated out to many servers. Hopefully this situation will remedy itself in the near future.

Here we get to see the results of a sneak,
stealth and sabotage mission - watch the planes burn!