YMMV / Medal of Honor: Underground

• Bizarro Episode: The secret level, "Panzerknacker Unleashed!", where you took a break from fighting regular German soldiers to infiltrate a castle. While that isn't weird in and of itself, said castle turns out to be occupied by dogs (including andromorphic dogs capable of firing machine-guns and bazookas, with some even operating armored personnel carriers), Teutonic Knights, and Nazi Zombies (that can fire machine guns, drive motorcycles, and explode upon defeat). And then there's the final section, where you enter a secret German lab full of automatons resembling the toy soldier from The Nutcracker. Most of said automatons wield assault rifles and Panzerschecks, and your only ally is the automaton prototype that you must reassemble. And the cherry on top? Said automaton prototype is not only much more durable and proficient with firearms than its mass produced brethren, it can even teleport!
• Demonic Spiders: Much like their Panzerschreck-wielding cousins from the first game, Panzerfaust-wielding soldiers during the final level can One-Hit Kill the player during certain sections. While this wouldn't normally be a problem, the narrow alleyways and streets in these levels can cause the player to get killed from the rockets' massive Splash Damage anyway if they manage to initially avoid it.
• Even Better Sequel: While Medal of Honor (1999) was undoubtedly a very strong start for the series, Underground manages to be as close to a perfect sequel as you can get and was in many ways a benchmark-setter for all the WWII shooters that followed after, and a big part of its success is it simply builds upon what made Medal of Honor (1999) so good:
  • Visually, the game has much more variety with levels featuring memorable French landmarks like the Eiffel Tower, the Notre Dame and the Catacombs under Paris, as well as locations outside of Western Europe like North Africa and Greece. There's a memorable level which is a big Shout-Out to Wolfenstein, where Manon infiltrates Himmler's creepy castle nestled deep in the dark forests of Germany and fights occultist Nazis.
  • Atmosphere and music direction is once again top-notch — most notably with the final missions in the Liberation of Paris where there is no music, just the diegetic sound of a French parlour singer singing an anthem of freedom over the loudspeakers and the far-off sounds of firefights between the German garrison and the French Resistance.
  • Enemy variety is also greatly improved this time too, as levels pit you against tanks and half-tracks to medieval knights, and missions throw more of these enemies at you than before making the action sequences more challenging and more exciting — you're taking on Panzer I Is in the streets of a French village very early on, and at one point even operating a machine-gun in a motorcycle sidecar during a thrilling escape from a weapons factory in the mountains.
  • The stealth sections where you play as more of a spy using disguises and subterfuge are expanded upon and given more prominence.
  • And finally where Medal of Honor (1999) put you in the boots of a fairly generic American commando doing One-Man Army sabotage missions against the Third Reich, Underground opts to tell the more idealistic and personal story of a young French woman who becomes thrust into the deadliest conflict in human history after her brother in La Résistance is tragically killed during an ill-fated raid on a German armory, and follows her missions across Europe and Africa to see her homeland break free from the German yoke.
• Porting Disaster: The Game Boy Advance version is a virtually unplayable mess. For one, it suffers from an incredibly slow framerate, the graphics are heavily toned down due to being on a handheld device, the HUD is barely visible, and several levels featured in the original had to be cut due to technical limitations.

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