Hints and Tips

Aiming Down The Sights

If you attempt to play MOH: Airborne as a standard shooter, then you're going to be confused at best, or worse, think that there's something wrong with the game's hit detection. In other words, you can't run forward and shoot your weapons without aiming, unless you want to get quickly dead.

You'll need to aim down the sights if you intend to actually hit anything with your weapons.

No, if you want to actually hit your foes, then get used to the practice of stopping and aiming. There's plenty of covers in the levels that you'll be playing in, so get used to ducking down low behind cover or around a corner, aiming down the sights, and popping up from behind cover to fire on your foes. You can quickly get behind cover by simply letting go of your analog stick, or by bending the other way. This is the only way to get maximum accuracy with your weapons. If you're not standing still and aiming down the sights while firing, you're not going to hit much.

Which isn't to say that you'll never hit someone if you don't fire down the sights: at extremely close ranges you can get by without aiming, especially if you use a rapid-fire weapon or something with a big spread, like the shotgun. If you're using a bolt-action rifle, though, just flip to melee attacks and use those instead.

Upgrading Your Weapons

Each of the weapons that you use in Airborne has three different upgrade levels that it can reach. When you start killing opponents with a weapon, you'll see its icon in the bottom right corner of the screen start to fill up with blue. When it reaches the top of the icon, you'll unlock a new ability for the weapon.

Each weapon will have different bonuses applied to it when you reach a new level. SMGs and assault rifles will usually get larger ammo clips, faster reload times, and less recoil. Grenades will let you earn satchels and bandoliers that will let you carry more of them. Some weapons will even get bayonets and knives that will let you deal more damage in melee combat. You'll have to experiment to see what each weapon unlocks, but it's not difficult to do so: just use your gun to kill a bunch of enemies!

You temporarily get infinite ammo when the screen goes blurry, so try to pelt a few more enemies when it does.

One thing to keep in mind is that you only keep the progress you've made with a weapon if you manage to hit a quicksave point. If you shoot a billion Germans with your shotgun and max it out, then die, you'll lose all the progress you've made. If, however, you shoot a billion Germans, max out the weapon, then perform an objective and reach a quicksave, then the weapon progress is locked into your profile and can't be lost, even if you subsequently quit the mission and go back to the main menu. So if you want to revisit an older level and build up your weapon skills, be sure to perioidically hit an objective to save your game.

Lastly, some weapons will eventually obtain removeable addons when you max them out, such as the G43, which gains a scope, and the Garand, which obtains a grenade launcher. If you don't particularly care for these addons, you can take them off your weapon with the alt-fire button (L1 on the Xbox 360 controller).

On Landing

Although the game designates safe zones for your landing pleasure (as indicated by the green smoke flares), you can feel free to land anywhere you like in the level. Sometimes landing outside of the designated zone will gain you a marked benefit (such as by landing on the church steeple in the third mission and sniping away at the start, or by running around on the rooftops in Husky), but sometimes it'll land you directly into an enemy concentration and wind up killing you before you can react.

In general, if you want to land outside the safe zones, pick an elevated position and bring along a sniper rifle or another slow-firing, powerful weapon that'll let you pick off enemies until your friendly soldiers can get to you. It won't always be a big benefit to you, but it will let you vary up your game experience.

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