It was somewhere around my visit to Eidos‘ booth at last week’s E3 that I started to realize just how many games are using the naming scheme “Something: Something Else.” This didn’t detract, thankfully, from my hands-on demo of Battlestations: Pacific, the sequel to 2007 WW2 RTS/action combat title Battlestations: Midway. I had a chance to take control of a few planes (well, several planes; I’m an awful pilot) and get a look at how Eidos’ upcoming alternate-history game would play out.
Like its predecessor, Battlestations: Pacific focuses on naval/air battles in the Pacific Theater, allowing players to fight their way through a number of major WW2 conflicts in a combination of RTS and one-to-one gameplay. Players can supervise the battle from afar, guiding their various ships and airplanes in a Risk-like interface to victory against a sequence of on-the-fly objectives. However, at any time, players can micromanage the battle on the individual level, jumping into control of any ship, manually aiming and firing its anti-aircraft cannons or launching torpedoes, or they can climb into the cockpit of any of their active planes, dogfighting and bombing their way across the flak-filled skies. Victory will require a careful balance between the two gameplay types: Stay too long on the big picture, and your AI-controlled troops may not be as effective against the enemy, but spend too long handling objectives personally, and you’ll remain unaware while the rest of your fleet is blasted to pieces.
The main additions to Battlestations: Pacific are the two campaigns it brings to the table. Picking up where Midway left off, Pacific will allow players to guide the Allied forces through the latter portions of the war, visiting Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and beyond. However, for the first time, Pacific will also present an alternate course to the war, including a “historically possible” campaign from the Japanese point of view. Starting with Pearl Harbor, the game will explore the possibility of different outcomes to battles like Midway, all the way up to a hypothetical Japanese victory for WW2. I wasn’t able to determine how fleshed-out the game’s story is from my demo, but there’s significant potential for historical fiction buffs if Eidos goes the distance here.
With an Eidos representative as my navigator, it was time for me to take to the skies and sample Battlestations: Pacific’s flight gameplay for myself. The plane controls were simple enough to grasp, mapping the throttle and yaw functions to the controller’s left stick and assigning the “flight stick” to the right. Weapons and handling will likely be different for the game’s 37 types of planes, including kamikaze aircraft. Machine guns and rockets at the ready, I was able to pick off a few enemy planes without too much difficulty. Flying in low to attack the land-based objectives was another story.
My flight instructor will be dreadfully disappointed.
With some guidance, I was able to throw plane after plane at the enemy’s buildings, before finally destroying them in a hail of rockets. Of course, while I’d been busy playing pilot, the rest of my fleet had been crushed by enemy ships and planes, re-emphasizing the dangers of too much micromanagement. Also, there was the fact that I’d spent roughly 2/3 of my total planes on these minor objectives — while ammunition will respawn during battles, units will not, making Battlestations a game of attrition. Before engaging in battle, a player may wish to spend a round or two in the game’s promised “Beginner Mode,” which basically amounts to zero-consequence free play.
Or, if you happen to be a master strategist but a lousy pilot, you might give the game’s multiplayer mode a whirl. Battlestations: Pacific will include 8-player (four-on-four) battles, allowing players to divvy up the responsibilities prior to engagement. One player, for example, might handle the gunboats, while another handles the carriers and planes, someone else manages the submarines, etc. These assignments can be changed at will, thankfully, so if you manage to sink all of your boats, you don’t have to sit out the rest of the battle; you can take control of someone else’s fleet. Multiplayer battles will mimic all of the tactical objectives and obstacles of the single-player campaign, producing secondary objectives for the players to accomplish for power-ups and resources (e.g., stop an enemy convoy from reaching the base). Tactical advantages such as overtaking islands and destroying enemy airfields will alter the flow of battle, as well. This “skirmish” mode can also be played in single-player versus AI opponents.
Battlestations: Pacific is scheduled to launch in early 2009 for the Xbox 360 and through Games for Windows.
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