Flying over enemy ground in a daring air raid, you and your comrades are packed in tighter than a tin of sardines. This isn't boot camp, it's the real thing. Planes go down in flames around you and suddenly high calibre bullets shred through your own plane and into your countrymen, turning once-ready soldiers into lifeless lumps of flesh. You're Private First Class Boyd Travers, a member of the All-American 82nd Airborne Division, and this is war.

The light goes on for the jump and all of a sudden you're thrust through a gaping doorway and floating above total chaos, your life in the balance as you pull the rip cord. Your only solace on the battlefield below is a green beacon, a flare that lets you know it's a relatively safe area to land. But do you head for that inviting grove full of health packs and ammo, or do you instead steer for the most intense areas of battle in the hope of gaining the upper hand against the Nazis? In Medal of Honor: Airborne, the choice is yours. Once you land, there's little time to untangle your chute and ready your weapon with Germans everywhere and objectives galore. The order in which you approach these objectives is actually up to you and it's a nice change from the linear approach of many shooters. Once you've decided on your objective, you're in for a good fight.

So how does the game actually play? Well, you're thrown into the thick of things depending on your landing position. If you land in the middle of a nest of Nazis then you can pretty much kiss your life goodbye. But if you head for one of the green zones then you're assured of some ammo and perhaps a few comrades to watch your back during whichever objective you choose to tackle first. Want to approach objective B first and then head for C and A? Fine, do that. Of course, objectives aren't signified by individual letters, but the fact is that every level has a pre-determined amount of objectives available, and you need to do them all. For example, in one level that takes place in an almost ruined city square, completing all of the objectives is the signal for a tank to come in and really try and ruin your day. Of course, being a MoH game, your job is to take out said tank and be the hero. There are quite a few of these scripted moments, and it does help to move the game along and make you feel that you're making a difference through your actions.

All this is great fun and all, but despite being used as mission bookmarks, these moments also tend to give you the feeling that you are only ostensibly given choice in the game, because each objective is still leading you to a scripted moment, whether it's a tank coming or some high-level squad of soldiers appearing. While it sounds like you're given a lot of freedom in the game, it doesn't really have a profound effect on each level, simply because you're still being led to a designated end point. So even if you did choose C over A, or D and then B, it has no lasting consequence whatsoever – they may as well have just plonked you down and made you work through all of them in order.

To help immerse you in Airborne's six campaign levels, EA has thrown its weight behind the Unreal 3 engine. Depth of field, motion blur, bump mapping – all are present and accounted for. This certainly helps to get you into the thick of things and almost every level has an impressive amount of detail to it. An unfortunate counterbalance to all of this graphical wizardry is the fact that nearly all of the levels are completely static when it comes to interactive physics. In this day and age of realistic in-game physics – with explosions wreaking havoc to the world and players around them – the complete lack of physical interaction becomes quite obvious in Airborne. You'll notice this mostly when throwing grenades or shooting explosive barrels: nothing else in the level is really affected at all.

This design philosophy trickles through the game in several ways. Shortcuts and emergent game exploits become impossible because of the existence of invisible walls and artificial corridors. Additionally, although you do parachute into each level, once you're on the ground there are definitely well-set paths that you must follow, corridors that lead to each objective like an inter-connected web of pretty-looking tunnels. In the end, you're still following a linear path, which may not quite be the open-ended war adventure that you were hoping for when you enlisted. Don't get me wrong, the game plays fine, and objectives run on from each other smoothly. I'm simply saying that when EA trumpet on about non-linearity like it's a brand new thing, they've really got to back that claim up, which is something they haven't done in Airborne.

There is one thing about the game that is pretty cool and that's the weapon upgrade system, which sees you rewarded for your marksmanship. As you inflict damage with each weapon, it will level up and get fitted with specific on-field modifications, such as increased damage, reduced recoil, more ammo per clip, and so on. While this is a fairly cool addition to the shooter genre, the game's shocking hit detection can sometimes act to stymie your upgrade path. Time and time again you'll curse as you fill a Nazi full of lead and not one bullet registers. Matters get even worse when you use a rifle (sniping is bloody hard). On the other side of the coin, enemy soldier are so accurate it hurts, and it's not uncommon to have just millimeters of peeking space (for example between a corner and some metal fencing), yet they'll still be able to ping you through it.

There's also the sad fact that Airborne is an incredibly short game. Only six missions await you and while they are all quite large and multi-faceted, they're only really going to take you around an hour tops to finish – so six hours of bang for your buck. Missions themselves are quite varied, with a nice mixture of day and night incursions. The very last level, in particular, is quite impressive, landing you on a massive Nazi tower and tasking you with infiltrating it on all levels. To make things interesting, the tower is infested with high-level Nazi soldiers dealing out some particularly nasty damage; if only every level in the game was so inspired.

Yes, the game can be visceral, but all of the little negative things add up to make you aware that it is just a game. The best war games (or any game for that matter) are ones that immerse you completely with intense action, objectives, scripted sequences and unexpected shenanigans. The unfortunate thing about Airborne is that you can almost see it trying so hard to be good that it leaves far too many bread crumbs along that difficult trail to perfection. As a result it tends to come across as more than a little try-hard. It's just too difficult to enjoy a game when enemies spawn right in front of you, your shots don't register, dead soldiers glitch and hang in mid-air, and textures don't seem to want to load properly.