Medal of Honor: Allied Assault War Chest

Medal of Honor: Allied Assault opens with the mission every WWII shooter since has been measured against: wading ashore at Omaha Beach into a wall of MG42 fire, watching a scripted, chaotic D-Day play out around you without ever quite feeling like a cutscene. That single mission, built two years before Saving Private Ryan's beach was still fresh in the culture, is the reason the game shipped to a 91 on Metacritic and the reason the same design team went on to found the studio behind the first Call of Duty.

The War Chest is the practical way to own the whole story. It bundles the base campaign with both expansion packs: Spearhead, which follows a paratrooper through Operation Overlord, the Battle of the Bulge, and the fight for Berlin, and Breakthrough, which moves the war to North Africa and Italy for Kasserine Pass, the race to Messina, and Monte Battaglia. Three campaigns, three fronts, one purchase, and the expansions genuinely change the shape of the game rather than padding it — new weapons, new enemy behavior, and objectives that ask more of positioning than the base campaign does.

Multiplayer is where the game shows its age most honestly. GameSpy, its original matchmaking service, has been dead since 2013, and the built-in server browser still tries to talk to it and fails. The practical fix is a community master server (xNULL) that a lot of dedicated servers now register with instead, plus direct IP connects for anyone who already knows a server's address. Four modes ship in the base game — Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Round-Based, and Objective — and the expansions add Tug-of-War and Liberation on top, both built around contested map objectives rather than pure kill count. It is id Tech 3 under the hood, so hosting a match yourself needs nothing more exotic than the game's own listen-server option.

The engine itself is where the War Chest is honestly showing 2002. It runs, but coaxing it onto a modern widescreen monitor, a high refresh rate display, or anything past its default 91 FPS cap takes console commands or a config file, and the retail build has no gamepad support at all — this is a mouse-and-keyboard game, full stop. That is exactly the gap the OpenMoHAA project closes: an open-source, GPL-licensed re-implementation of the same id Tech 3 engine that runs natively on Windows, Linux, and macOS, ships a proper widescreen fix, and replaces GameSpy with a maintained master server of its own. PlayBound lists it as this game's edition rather than a separate download, because it needs your War Chest's original files to run and exists specifically to make them run better.

What holds up without any asterisks is the mission design. Omaha Beach is the mission everyone remembers, but the sniper duel through the ruins of Stalingrad-style rubble, the night infiltration missions, and Spearhead's Belgian farmhouse assaults are all doing careful, deliberate scripted-event work that a lot of louder modern shooters have stopped bothering with. If you can tolerate a 2002 interface, or you install OpenMoHAA and skip that problem entirely, the campaigns still deliver.