Heroes of the Pacific review

I won't bore you with my flight sim credentials, suffice to say I've played quite a few flight sims and really miss the kind of games we used to get from Microprose. While I enjoy Microsoft's flight simulators and recent efforts such as IL2 Sturmovik and LOMAC, there's been a lack of atmosphere and fun in many recent games.

That atmosphere is usually provided by the more action orientated games such as Ace Combat. However the middle ground, convincing if simplified flight dynamics, mated with dramatic and exciting gameplay seems to have disappeared with Microprose. Sure we've had Secret Weapons Over Normandy, but to me that felt like Space Invaders in a WW2 setting, such was the removal of all the elements that made the original great.

A Day of Infamy

So we turn to Heroes of the Pacific, a game I've been looking forward to thanks to the impressive graphics, yet have been rather pleasantly surprised by the quality of the actual flight. But I'll come to that in a while, first lets look at the actual setup. The setting is World War II as two young men join the US military. One becomes a sailor on the Arizona, the other a pilot in the USAAF.

The action begins during the battle of Pearl Harbour. You take to the sky to defend the base, the hangers, the fuel supply and Battleship Row from the attacking squadrons from the Japanese Navy. Right away you get a flavour of the game - it has plenty of atmosphere with lots of radio chatter, many planes in the sky, excellent explosions and particularly impressive anti-aircraft fire bursting in the sky.

So the game throws you in at the deep and and starts well, and it's the weaker missions that come first. The game gets better than this as it continues. Yet it also introduces one of the elements that weakens the game, something I'll return to later in this review.

A La Mode

There's plenty of ways to play the game. The centre of the game is the campaign mode, which is a linear progression of set missions. Quick Mission mode allows you to choose any unlocked location and set up an aerial battle. Historical Missions are unlocked throughout the game too, which you can then replay as many times as you like.

Flight Training Mode introduces many of the concepts you'll need to master to succeed in Heroes of the Pacific. Two of the skills that do need to be practised are dive bombing and dropping torpedoes. The former is trickier, trying to get the right dive angle and speed while accurately dropping your payload on the target. This is especially tricky when trying to drop ordnance onto moving ships.

Using torpedoes is slightly easier, but care must be taken to watch the indicators on the HUD that show that your plane is low enough and slow enough to drop a torpedo. You also have to make sure that you lead a target that is moving quickly. You're a sitting duck while lining up a torpedo drop and it really brings home to you how brave the pilots of torpedo bombers where and why they needed a gunner sat behind them.

Multiplayer Action

Split screen multiplayer is provided and it's surprisingly fun, but many Xbox players will want to take the game online with Xbox Live. The actual gameplay, with a variety of modes and ability to include AI aircraft works pretty well. There's no lag and I found dog-fighting against humans a rather exciting proposition.

Alas the actual setup of Xbox Live play leaves a lot to be desired and I hope there's a downloadable update. Firstly I never managed to get voice-coms working while playing, perhaps the game doesn't support it, or maybe none of the people I played against were chatty.

More seriously though is the way games end. After a match, whether you're hosting or not, rather than return to a lobby, you are dropped back to the Xbox Live menu. So you have to create another game or find the people you were playing with. Xbox Live has been around for long enough now that you expect companies not to make such a hash of Xbox Live. It's a shame as once you're in the air, the online gameplay is excellent.

Flying with the Pros

My real delight with the game came the first time I saw the option before my first mission to choose my flying style. I chose pro and instead of the usual arcade flight model was greeted with something with much more depth, at least for a console game.

Care must be taken to keep an eye on airspeed as it's possible to stall, with the plan falling to earth very quickly. There are some interesting options before you fly too, the guns can be set to a normal, narrow or wide spread or even depressed down if the next mission is more focused on ground attack.

On the whole I found the actual flying to be the most pleasing I've experienced in a console game since Aero Dancing on the Dreamcast. It feels like flight, rather than a point and shoot game.

FUBAR

The problem that's really getting on my nerves is the reliance on stupid defend objectives. Heroes of the Pacific ably recreates massive aerial and ground battles with a real sense that you're involved in a larger conflict. Then at the same time removes this atmosphere by making the whole war depend on the player.

Yes you may be one of ten other US pilots in the sky, but if you can't personally defend an allied general from 20+ Japanese Zeros then it's game over for you. I hate this kind of design, it's lazy and stupid and totally destroys immersion. It's also a way of making the game harder to slow down progress, otherwise a lack of real game length is revealed.

The defend objectives really do taint a game that I have really been enjoying. For example one mission had me attacking enemy AA emplacements and enemy planes, I was really enjoying it, then two US C47 transports started heading our way and I realised that I was amidst yet another dumb defend mission. Yes it was up to me to defend these two transports or the war was over.

It's so frustrating that developers rely on this kind of lame gameplay. I've nothing against having to defend the allied planes, but what I do object to is that this becomes a make or break issue in continuing the game. If I didn't manage to defend the planes then show me a branching mission structure that carried on from this event. Or they shouldn't be mission-ending objectives, just minor ones.

In a game that's striving to tell a historical story, it's annoying that despite all the other wonderful aspects of the game, it's still just a tarted up version of Space Invaders, just me against all the bad guys or the world is over.

Rant Over

I'm still playing Heroes of the Pacific though. It's a gorgeous game, smooth with great detailed graphics. There are so many sweet touches that make it an entertaining package. From the WWII poster-style front end, to the beautiful weather effects and tarrying flack, it remains a charming and attractive game.

And when you're not having to tackle yet another stupid piece of defending gameplay it really is a treat. The final marks I'm giving the game reflect my frustration with the defending aspects of the game and the poor implementation of Xbox Live, but if you're a fan of flight action games this is one of the better ones around. It's a flawed game, but one I'm enjoying a lot.