Cover System

Lore & Background

In the 2010 Medal of Honor, the player follows a small squad of U.S. Army soldiers through the North African and Italian campaigns of 1943. The cover system mirrors how these men actually fought: hugging a crumbling wall in a Tunisian village, ducking behind a stacked sandbag line in a Sicilian town, or using the lip of a trench to pop up and suppress an enemy machine-gunner before sliding back down. Every engagement is a rhythm of exposure and concealment, and the game rewards players who respect that rhythm.

Above and Beyond (2020) revisits the same principle through the eyes of a single paratrooper in the Normandy campaign. The cover objects are slightly more varied—barricaded doorways, overturned vehicles, church pews—and the system is tuned to feel more fluid, but the underlying fiction is identical: a soldier in the open is a soldier about to die, and the world is full of things you can hide behind if you know where to look.

Across both entries the cover system is not a separate mode or toggle; it is woven into level design. Corridors are narrow, chokepoints are deliberate, and the geometry of a room is built so that the player's natural movement path runs along coverable edges. The mechanic is therefore less a feature you activate and more the default grammar of the combat space.

In Their Own Story

The dust was still settling from the mortar round when Kowalski yanked me behind the half-collapsed adobe wall. "Stay low," he muttered, his M1 Garand already shouldered, the bolt cycling with a dry metallic snap. Through the gap I could see the Italian position across the street—two men, a Breda machine gun, the muzzle still glowing. I pressed my back against the rough plaster, felt the vibration of a distant shell, and waited. Kowalski peeked, fired twice, pulled back. The machine-gunner dropped. We moved to the next cover, then the next, the whole street a relay of walls and shadows, until the enemy position was nothing but a smoking tripod and silence.

Reader's Guide

The Cover System is the structured, object-based concealment mechanic that became the backbone of Medal of Honor's combat, most fully realized in the 2010 entry (EA Los Angeles) and refined in Above and Beyond (2020).

In practice, the player walks up to any coverable object—a wall, a sandbag stack, a crate, a vehicle hull—and the character automatically crouches and presses against it, breaking the enemy's line of sight. From that position you can peek left or right to scan for threats, strafe along the object to change your angle, and fire with reduced exposure. Releasing cover lets you sprint to the next object. Allies in the 2010 title also use cover, calling out enemy positions and suppressing fire while you reposition.

What makes it distinct to Medal of Honor, versus say Gears of War or Call of Duty, is the era and the pacing. WWII small arms have slower rates of fire and less magazine capacity, so the cover rhythm is longer, more deliberate, and more punishing if you pop up carelessly. The design intent is to make the player feel the vulnerability of a single rifleman in an open field and the relief of a wall between you and the next burst.

The player experience is a slow, tense metronome: move, hide, observe, fire, hide again. It turns every firefight into a series of small decisions about when to spend your exposure, which is a fundamentally different feel from the constant sprint-and-spray of many modern FPS titles.

Did You Know?

• The 2010 Medal of Honor cover system was a deliberate departure from the free-running style of Allied Assault (2002) and Frontline (2000), shifting the franchise toward a more structured, tactical combat loop.
• In both the 2010 entry and Above and Beyond, level geometry is specifically designed so that natural movement paths run along coverable edges, making the system feel like the default way to navigate combat rather than an
• The cover system in Medal of Honor uses WWII-appropriate objects—adobe walls, sandbag lines, wooden crates, overturned vehicles—rather than the sci-fi or modern-military cover seen in other franchises, reinforcing the pe
• Above and Beyond (2020) retained the core cover loop but tuned it for slightly faster transitions and a broader set of coverable objects, while keeping the single-soldar-perspective storytelling that distinguishes it fro