Medal of Honor: Infiltrator

Medal of Honor: Infiltrator brings the Medal of Honor war series to the Game Boy Advance in the form of a top-down action shooter. The player takes on the role of an Allied agent carrying out missions during the Second World War – from sabotage through prisoner rescues to destroying enemy equipment – progressing gradually through European battlefields while collecting period-appropriate weaponry and completing sub-objectives within each mission. The mission structure combines straightforward shooting with elements of more cautious progression, where the player must avoid patrols or eliminate them one by one to avoid triggering an alarm across the whole area.

The top-down view allows the handheld to clearly display buildings, streets, and outdoor battlefields without the game having to deal with a more complex 3D environment. The visual style maintains the wartime theme the series is famous for on major consoles too, while the sound design draws on the orchestral tone that has belonged to the Medal of Honor brand since its very first entries on PlayStation. The result is a compact, mission-based shooter that tries to preserve the more serious, cinematic atmosphere even in this more limited handheld form, where the cutscenes are missing but the rhythm of the missions stays similar.

Within the GBA library, Infiltrator ranked among the more solid attempts to bring a major console shooter brand to a handheld device, although it naturally had to forgo much of the cinematic quality and scope of the main entries available on PlayStation 2 or PC. Reviews rated it as decent, if not exactly revolutionary, for fans of the war-action genre, offering them an acceptable substitute for the big console entries on the go. Today it's an interesting example of how publishers adapted major licenses to a smaller format, and for fans of retro war shooters it still offers a solid mission-by-mission package without unnecessary compromises to the core gameplay.