The Pacific saw intense naval and air battles in World War II, principally between the United States and Japan. The most clever and heroic moves and countermoves were played out on a flat blue plane of water interrupted by small islands. Now you can run the battle from both sides of the war: Battlestations Pacific is here! It's amazing all the things you can do with it. My experience began with the first missions on the American side, with defending ships from airplane attack...
Here, you can see me diving after a Japanese plane that will probably try to crash into the aircraft carrier below. Nuts to that, I say! Better to blow it apart before it has a chance to get anywhere. You can see my objective on the upper left. This plane already counts as a "kill" even though it's still under pilot control. I'm paranoid about kamikazes so I'll generally follow a plane into the drink just to make sure everyone on the boat gets where they're going safely. The orange arrows on the bottom of the screen point to a squadron of enemy planes so maybe following the kamikaze wasn't the smartest move I could've pulled....
That battle was me verses the computer but it wasn't long before I hankered after fighting another human. I joined the Imperial Japanese Navy to give the Americans a taste of Imperial whatfor.
That's me getting hammered most soundly by the Americans. This is a screenshot of a Games for Windows - LIVE multiplayer session, featuring the DUEL gametype. In it, each player has a small fleet of ships and go bow-to-bow with a small fleet from the other side. The first person to sink the other ships (or at least more of them in a 15-minute period) wins. The scene above depicts one of the Emperor's best ships getting shelled with artillery. Note the "spectator" text in the near middle of the screen. This was my penalty for letting my flagship sink. If you let your flagship go down you have to spectate the rest of the battle and hope that your sailors have been trained well enough to finish the job. By the by, I found ship-launched torpedoes to be particularly effective in duels.
Next I explored the strategy mode of Battlestations Pacific, where you direct where your fleet and squadrons go on a larger scale.
What I found compelling here was that I knew when my strategy played out and the war came to close-in fighting, I'd be the one pulling the trigger behind every bullet. Thus, my decisions as a strategist had a direct impact on the difficulty of the tactical game, and I'm the one who paid the consequences for making good and bad decisions. If it was a good decision, victory was easy and I didn't suffer any deaths. Bad decisions meant I was going into the drink.
Each plane and ship has a variety of weapons to choose from and Battlestations Pacific is Johnny-on-the-spot with instructions for how to deploy your weapons or steer your fleet. It took a bit of getting used to at the beginning but after I got into it, the controls felt intuitive. If you have an Xbox Controller for Windows you won't regret it, as it's integrated pretty well into the control scheme.
A quick word about realism: Battlestations Pacific is not hyperrealistic but at the same time it's not arcadelike either. For example, your planes have unlimited ammo, but they also have rudder and throttle controls with all of the flight characteristics those instruments imply. You can stall out or jink, but you won't have to worry about minutiae like refueling either. On ships you can control direction and speed, as well as assign damage control to fighting fires verses repairing the hull or fixing guns, but shooting is as easy as lining up a crosshair and pulling the trigger. (Actually hitting after adjusting for moving objects and trajectories is another matter, however.)
Battlestations Pacific is all about mix. Strategy with tactics, realism with fun gameplay, and getting you into battle quickly but giving you plenty to sit back and think about as well.
And now if you'll excuse me, I must tend to the matter of capturing some islands...
— Eric Haddock
Gamertag: Abashima