YMMV / Medal of Honor: Allied Assault

• Demonic Spiders:
  • German Shepherds in Allied Assault. Unlike the same kind of dogs in games like Call of Duty: World at War or Modern Warfare, they don't bark loudly. And while they don't pin you down and kill you in one hit, their bites have the same stopping power as a Kar 98 sniper rifle. Thankfully, the expansions didn't feature them, even in missions set behind enemy lines.
  • Due to the ridiculous recoil you get upon getting hit anyone with an automatic weapon, from submachine guns to mounted machine guns, counts. The worst offenders, though, are arguably the example below.
  • Soldiers with the StG-44 in the late levels can kill players in one burst, especially on higher difficulties. Thankfully, they fire slowly and expansions have them spawn much less often.
  • German snipers, especially on higher difficulties as well. Like the StG-44 riflemen, they can effortlessly reduce a player's HP to Zero in just one magazine, with precision accuracy.
  • Italian P40 tanks in the Gela mission. They can and will overrun your position during the final portion.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: Breakthrough. Compared to Allied Assault and Spearhead, which by themselves were already challenging to a lot of players, this expansion takes the difficulty further by making ammunition and medical resupply much, much harder to come by, more enemy troops rushing at or opening fire at you in various sequences, and your AI allies dropping like flies much more often compared to the first two titles. A good number of players have complained that the challenge level even in easier difficulties is excessive.
• My Real Daddy: While 2015 Inc. had only developed this entry in the Medal of Honor series, EA Los Angeles' continued inability to live up to Allied Assault eventually lost gamers' favor, and caused them to jump ship to Call of Duty, which was made by many of this game's developers.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • In Breakthrough you're going to ammo-starve to death as now only every third or fourth enemy drops their gun when killed. This means you can't lean on the submachine guns all the time, unlike in the base game. Considering how insanely accurate late-game enemies are this gets incredibly frustrating. Thankfully the expansions allow you to lean in single player which makes it much easier to avoid damage.
  • Switching between weapons may as well take the rest of your life, so you're stuck in a Morton's Fork situation should your magazine run empty.
  • Getting hit by bullets really shakes your screen, compared to other games even at the time. As a result, sniper duels are basically a Cycle of Hurting given that the enemy snipers always know where you are and fire immediately.
• Scrappy Weapon:
  • Pistols and melee. Ammo is so abundant for submachine guns and rifles (yet, ironically, not pistols) that you'll never need to actually use a pistol, as they're inaccurate and weak unless you score a headshot, while the alt-fire whip strike is even more pointless, since it doesn't deal a lot of damage, isn't silent, and you can only perform it with the pistol in the base game. And in Breakthrough, because of the much scarcer ammo, you're forced to rely on these. Fun.
  • The Springfield Sniper Rifle is not exactly atrocious in and of itself, but it is horribly inferior to the Scoped Kar98K, which fires much faster with no downsides. This is made painfully obvious in "Sniper's Last Stand".
• Sequel Difficulty Spike:
  • While Allied Assault was already considered difficult on its own, both Spearhead and Breakthrough manage to amp the difficulty up, thanks to health packs becoming more scarce and so on.
  • Breakthrough, among other things it did, made it much more difficult to resupply both health and ammunition for weapons, often resulting in various Drought Level of Doom scenarios by the second level alone.
• Sequelitis: Breakthrough, compared to the base game and Spearhead. There are numerous historical inaccuracies, and a very unpleasant Sequel Difficulty Spike. As a result of these, it received lower review scores.
• That One Level:
  • In the base game:
    • Escape from Trondheim. You're forced to cut through two or three platoons of angry Kriegsmarine soldiers, whose formal uniform blends in with the greenish of the scenery, and health is hard to come by. The level is long even if you know where to go, with a Timed Mission segment at the end. Worse, if you're using an earlier version of the popular iron sights Game Mods, you can't even start the level because crouching is glitched and you can't move through the Air-Vent Passageway^note later mod iterations fixed this issue.
    • The Communications Blackout. Get ready to backpedal from the start of the final stretch all the way to Manon's truck, all the way through blasting away at a horde of stupidly fast dogs whose bites hurt like rifle shots, while Jerry shoots you through the brush because the AI has cheat-o-vision powers.
    • Sniper's Last Stand, where you might as well bind quicksave and quickload to the left and right mouse buttons. A traipse through a large map filled with hidden, psychic hitscan snipers who fire as soon as you exit cover, followed by an Escort Mission with a bunch of apparently suicidal engineers who constantly run on ahead of you, and the same psychic hitscan snipers (though in lesser numbers, thank goodness!). The next part isn't any better: you have to drive a King Tiger tank through enemy territory, and in it Crew of One is deconstructed to annoying effect despite there being a full crew: the tank doesn't have a machine gun, so all you have to defend yourself with is the main gun, which is ridiculously slow at reloading. Save Scumming is mandatory to get past any section where Germans with Panzerschreks appear in any number above one.
    • Final Run can be somewhat difficult, as even with Fort Schmerzen exploding around the Germans will continue to try impeding your escape. The most difficult part is the very final stretch. The save spot is right at the entrance of the fort, but your health will not reset and you'll be beset upon by a platoon of German soldiers waiting outside, most of them likely equipped with automatic weapons. You can't take cover inside the fort to kill them, as the explosion will deal damage and kill you. But there is practically no cover outside, and enemy snipers will be back in the towers surrounding the train, whose doors will not open until all the German soldiers outside the fort are dead. Failure sends you back to the load point just inside the fort's entrance, giving you scarce few seconds to react and exit the fort and try again.
  • Spearhead
    • The third Bastogne mission, where you have to help save a wounded Captain from bleeding to death by bringing a medic to him. Problem is, there's constant German artillery fire, forcing you, and later the Medic, to Take Cover! in foxholes. What's worse is that this is a Timed Mission, since the Captain can and will bleed to death should you take too long on the way back to the Captain's position.
    • And after that segment, you and a small number of other soldiers are forced to Hold the Line against a German armored assault, where the German tanks and half-tracks can easily overrun your position and/or kill you.
    • The main difficulty, however, comes from the enemy infantry, as even a single soldier crossing your line results in an automatic Game Over.
  • Breakthrough
    • Gela, the final section of the Sicily level, where you're forced to fight off Italian tanks with a very inaccurate mortar should (or rather, when) you run out of bazooka ammo. It's pretty much a guarantee that they will overrun your position and/or kill you. And even before that, you're forced to fight through platoons of Italian infantry hiding in buildings and undergrowth, and they will deplete your health regardless of difficulty.
    • Bizerte, specifically the first level. First, you're to cross a heavily-defended river bank under intense German fire. Then, you're to storm a heavily-guarded fortress with little to no medkit and ammunition resupply. And then you're supposed to link up with an OSS contact which then turns into a very tricky Escort Mission where said contact is prone to being killed constantly by enemy grenades at the last segment.
    • Monte Cassino II is a pain of a level, snipers in fog, lack of health and ammo even by Breakthrough's standards, enemies who track you through walls and spam grenades and then you have to rescue P.O.Ws, who practically die in 1-2 hits and there's a bit where four enemies pop up at once so you pretty much have to take the bullet for the POW in order for him to have a chance of survival.

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