A breakthrough is exactly what gamers were looking for in the new first-person addition to the Medal of Honor series, appropriately entitled Breakthrough. This time out, you are Sgt. Baker of the U.S. Army, and you are making your way thru Axis-controlled Northern Africa and Italy. Along the way, you command a host of new weapons, such as the Enfield sniper rifle, the Vickers machine gun, and the PIAT short range anti-tank launcher, among others.

The visuals and play of this add-on package far exceed its predecessor, Spearhead, in fluidity, playability, and overall fun. The missions are exciting, even hair-raising: searching a town for 3 perched snipers while covering a group of medics, or racing an Italian railroad tank down a hill toward German soldiers who are poised to fill you full of lead. The multiplayer version now includes a "liberation" mode, in which once players perish, they become POWs until they are either rescued, or the whole team gets captured. This adds an intriguing new element to the already great online play.

While the graphics and music for this installment in the series are superb, they're not without some major downsides. The highly intense sandstorm graphics on the first map need to be handled with a pretty high-end video card. My gaming rig (P4 2.26 Ghz, 768 MB RAM) is equipped with a GeForce 4 Ti4600, but I had trouble keeping the FPS above 60 during this map. While other maps are not as demanding, there are some occasional jitters. Lower-end PCs can expect to have trouble keeping the game in a higher detail mode.

The 11 maps played in this installment fall a bit short of what most players would expect. Also, the difficulty level has really been upped on this version. In "medium" difficulty mode, some of the missions are nearly impossible, even for the best of players. This may deter some players, especially more casual gamers or those who might give up easily.

Still, overall this game does what the designers at Electronic Arts and 2015 wanted it to: hold players over until Spring, 2004, when Medal of Honor: Pacific Theater comes out. This game delivers the goods for those who are fans of the series, and those who already own Medal of Honor: Allied Assault should rush out, pick this up, and help the Allies win the war once again. I'll give it 4 Headies and a Torso out of 5. (That's 4.5, for you non-leet-gamers.)