Good
On the Level
If you've seen any previews or marketing for Airborne, you know the game's key twist: you start each level by jumping out of a plane towards a combat zone. The game's six levels are spread out across key settings of the European WWII campaign, such as Operation Husky or Operation Market Garden. As you drift to the ground, you're able to steer towards several safe landing zones, marked by green smoke; there are several on each level, which you uncover as you explore. It's a cool feature, but in practice, the drops make up a tiny fraction of the gameplay, even when you're forced to re-jump into the action after an untimely death.
Every mission starts with you and your fellow Airborne jumping into combat.
The jumps, however, are part of a much bigger plan, which is Airborne's greatest strength: huge open levels which you're free to explore to a degree that we rarely see in shooters. They're not quite as huge as, say, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., but more like huge multiplayer maps that happen to have enemies and objectives tucked away in various corners. The objectives themselves are familiar territory -- set explosives, secure an area, etc. -- but rather than being led by the nose through the game, you're able to map out your own path and attack objectives in whatever order you please.
At times, it's obvious you're being shuffled along, such as one scene where you're forced to navigate a long series of trenches and perilous three-story catwalks because of your inability to scale a gate barely taller than yourself (would it have killed anyone to make the gate 10 feet high?) But even within these sub-missions, the combat areas owe more to Gears of War than DOOM: large areas dotted with cover where you can attack straight on or try to find one of numerous paths to flank from the side. There's something satisfying about sneaking up on a pit of enemies and lobbing a grenade their way when they're focused elsewhere, and it's something Airborne allows you to do more than most shooters.
Helping to bolster the general sense of freedom are the game's health and weapons systems. The health mechanic is a cross between those found in older shooters and the newer breed as seen in Halo or the newer Call of Duty games: you still have a health bar, divided into four segments, but each recharges over time, providing more incentive to take cover when injured rather than waste time scrounging for health packs. Your soldier can carry three weapons at a time (as well as grenades), and you get to pick your loadout at the start of each mission, so you get to make the call of going with traditional machineguns or perhaps using the trusty Springfield sniper rifle if you're so inclined. Each of the safe zones that you jump down to has a one-time restock of health and ammunition, so even scrounging for ammo isn't an issue most of the time.
This all comes together nicely in the first half of "Market Garden," where you start by landing in a small town -- or what remains of it. It looks like every WWII map you've played a hundred times: several square blocks of buildings reduced to little more than rubble, with enemy soldiers scattered throughout. Except here, there's not just one pre-scripted path you're forced to run through; you can land in the safety zone with your squadmates and pick your way to various objectives, or land on a rooftop and start sniping to thin out the enemy. I eventually made my way to the steeple of a church, where I was having a blast just picking off enemies... until Airborne's poor AI design brought it to a screeching halt.
