The answer to this question is debated a lot online and people have their differing opinions. For me the answer was obvious ever since I played it. The answer is not Call of Duty 1 or 2, Battlefield 1942, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, nor is it Allied Assault. It is Medal of Honor: Frontline.

The other candidates are all pretty good games and I rank them highly, but Frontline I place above all those. This is pretty impressive for what people referred to as a poor man’s Allied Assault. This is no nostalgia or anything like that. I replayed the game back in 2022 and it still felt awesome. I remapped the buttons and it still felt as I remembered. The game still pulled me in, and I loved it the same.

Frontline came out a few years after Saving Private Ryan and Steven Spielberg had worked with EA/Dreamworks to create the series. There was a big emphasis on production value. The score is done by an orchestra and everything is pretty detailed. Frontline is actually the first MOH game Spielberg wasn’t involved in.

The game starts off with the best traditional D-Day rendition in gaming. It is ranked higher than Allied Assault. It is not overdone and full of cutscenes like COD:WWII. You fight your way on to the beach and have to save people, blow a whole through barb wire and it’s into the breach.

The game then changes, it goes from being the traditional WWII shooter, then you become a spy. Your sneaking on to U-Boats, infiltrating parties and enemy compounds, to find a secret German weapon that the OSS is concerned about.

The game itself is ironic because it is the best WWII FPS while having some of the worst hit boxes. It is very frustrating and hard at times to shoot at a group of people up close and not many of your bullets hit them. Checkpoints were not a thing in this game, so you restart at the beginning. Its levels, gameplay and wonder of where this is going next, keep you coming back.

Frontline also has one of the best train missions in an FPS. Your on an armored train, chasing after the general in charge of the project you need to stop. You’re fighting people on the train and other armored trains.

Graphically, the game still holds up just fine, it looks just like how I remember it. There’s a good diversity of environments, not just the gray and brown filtered levels you’d see in later war games. There’s also towns that look like nice towns and you have a city at night. I have only played the PS2 version, but I know the others target 60 fps. I also never played the 2010 remastered version, I just know it had ADS and a lot of bugs.

I recently found an article from 2022 where the game’s lead designer Chris Cross discussed a remake. He said some things I have to address. He’d want for the game to be open world and I’m not sure why. Going open world would just add unneeded padding to the game and most likely kill pacing. If you can give the impression of a bigger world outside the game and have the audience use their imagination to see it, you don’t need one. One of the biggest misconceptions is in linear games you can’t do objectives in whatever order you want. Yes you can and you can do it in Frontline. There were many times in this game and others I missed where earlier objectives were and did others, and would have to go back through the level and find what I missed. Even with open world games, certain things have to be done to unlock more levels or parts of a level.

Cross also wanted to emphasize the survival aspect as a spy behind enemy lines. I don’t want a resource gatherer, just have some cutscenes or small bits between missions, nothing more.

One thing I would agree with him on is the stealth. In the game there is several incidents where your in disguise or would make more sense that there was stealth. Operation Rapunzel, The Golden Lion, the secret weapons facility and the train station all come to mind. If your in disguise you shouldn’t have scripted events always breaking your cover. It would be cool to have to avoid certain people or take different routes to the objective to keep your cover. I’m be a little concerned about it because he says he wants it to be like Assassins Creed.

MOH: Frontline blended the realism and detail of a Call of Duty or Saving Private Ryan with a grounded story on secret German weapons of WWII. Up until that point, it was either the realistic game or the unrealistic secret hi-tech wonder weapons and story from Wolfenstein. Having a game blend those so well, is why I call it the best of all time

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