So the Medal of Honor: Airborne Demo was released yesterday. Supposedly it was exclusive to fileplanet, but I saw a host of other download sites being posted around the web’s tubes.

My quick impressions:

After playing the demo a few (dozen) times, I’ve got to play with all the weapons up to their max upgrades. It’s pretty shocking how easy it is, as I was able to get all of the weapons to their max except the pistol and grenades (I got close on the pistol!). Albeit they were on successive replays. I’d say the weapon that gets my favorite upgrades is the German SMG (an MP40? I can’t remember). You get a double sized clip and a brutal one-shot knife melee attack. But the garand grenade attachment is also a blast (pun intended, I guess).

The German SMG is a beast from the beginning, and just gets better. The thompson is more deadly but it is more erratic in fire, so you can’t do midrange nearly as well. The two rifles are both nice, the garand slightly less powerful and less accurate than its german counterpart (the KAR), as expected. grenades have a neat explsion cloud and make people fly everywhere. In fact even pistol shots can make bodies fly, the “PhysX” works a little overtime.

You can seemingly jump from most roofs without any damage. But when I was trying to do one of those trick landings, I fell right down the middle of a staircase and went kerplop. I only got 3 of the supposed 5 trick landings. The hardest being the balcony opening one. I did the church steeple and the open staircase as well, but I have no idea what the other ones are. Landing on the mayor’s house doesn’t get you any reward except a hail of bullets.

I started off with all settings on high but with no post-processing. This was playable but had that famous MOH mouse lag. I didn’t want to reduce my prerender limit, so I just dropped down to medium on everything, which was slightly more playable. I then went back and turned models to low and left everything to medium and it plays beautifully, and the only thing I noticed was shadows were reduced. So I’m happy enough with that. (I have an 8600GT vidcard).

This is the first game to tax out my core2duo. It stays at 100% usage on both cores the whole time. I have a feeling this was the result of Ageia PhysX slurping up as many cycles as are free. At least , I hope that’s what it is, because having your processor pegged solely by a game usually results in CPU lag, which is the worst kind. I didn’t notice any though. I may run a performance graph on processes later.

So I may be able to squeeze out just a bit more life outta this vidcard. Surprisingly both Bioshock and this game are highly playable on it, but I think having to step down to low settings for the first time means it is on it’s last legs. I’m hoping that my processor will hold out until the Penryns come out and have at least one price drop.