Medal of Honor: Above & Beyond review (Quest)

Medal of Honor: Above & Beyond just received a port for the Oculus Quest 2 headset, marking the second big headset exclusive for the Quest 2 after the recent Resident Evil 4 launch. We dove in to see how it turned out.

We’ll be honest in saying that we were pretty surprised and a little skeptical when we saw that Medal of Honor: Above & Beyond was being released for the Quest 2. After all, it was demanding on even a powerful rig when the PC version launched, so how was the Quest going to handle this? And looking past performance alone, this was a game that demanded over 100 GB of data to be installed on the PC, so that alone was going to be a bit of a thing on the Quest.

To start with the latter – this is a still a hefty game, and by far the largest Quest download so far, clocking in at over 40 GB of data. On a 64 GB model of the headset (which we used), that’s a lot. Like… “delete almost everything else” amounts of data, as some of those 64 GBs are used for system software. If you have a handful of favorites installed, this can be a bit frustrating, and we can now see why they’ve phasing out the 64 GB models in favor of ones with more storage capacity.

Having said that, with that 40 GB you get everything that was included with the original PC release, from the tutorial and single player campaign to the multiplayer portion and the interviews that made the PC version so interesting from a historical perspective. It’s a shame that they didn’t go for an option to just install the base game and have the multiplayer and video footage be addons though, as it would have saved some storage space. Mostly on the video side of things though, as the multiplayer modes reuse a lot of the campaign levels.

Medal of Honor: Above & Beyond looks great for a mobile headset port of a very resource-hungry PC title. Sure, you’ll see differences in the quality of environments, lighting effects and character models in particular, but the end result is still that of an epic story-driven WW II shooter – which we didn’t think was going to be possible on a headset like this. Surprisingly, the developers have left in a few visual quality options as well, letting players select how they want their visual fidelity versus comfort levels to be. Want a higher resolution? You can do that, but it’ll be at the expense of a bit of performance. Definitely interesting to see, and in a way this future proofs the game for upcoming generations of Quest headsets as well.

Part of that epic story-driven experience mentioned above comes from the series’ signature set pieces, which are made even better through impressive audio that includes full voice acting, soaring music and positional audio effects. What also helps is that the Quest version comes with some of the quality of life upgrades that came to the PC version post-launch, like the ability to turn on smooth turning.

If you ever wanted to experience an epic single player story campaign on the Quest 2, then Medal of Honor: Above & Beyond more than delivers. It’s heavy on the narrative with tons of cutscenes and well designed set pieces, and although the multiplayer is fairly generic and things don’t look as sharp on the Quest, it’s easily the closest thing we’ve gotten to a cinematic shooter campaign on the Quest yet.

Score: 8.0/10