Heroes of the Pacific is, shock of shocks, a World War II game. Before you dismiss it instantly, however, you ought to know that Heroes of the Pacific is a well put together play that is a vast improvement over most other flight sims of the genre. Whether or not you buy it depends on how dedicated you are to flight sims, or to historical gaming in general.
Unfortunately, like almost every other World War II game, this one features a story that combines a Heart of America hero with a long, yet blessedly skippable history lesson wedged between each actual mission (Dear Gaming Companies of the World- I KNOW WHAT HAPPENED DURING WORLD WAR II. MY DEGREE IS IN AMERICAN HISTORY. PLEASE STOP. THANK YOU.) Your protagonist used to fly a crop-duster plane in his youth, but was serving in the Navy with his brother when the Japanese hit Pearl Harbor. His brother, of course, was serving on the U.S.S. Arizona, and perished when the Japanese attack sunk that ship. The protagonist swears vengeance and proceeds rather conveniently to be transferred to every major theatre of the Pacific War except Wake Island.
Actual gameplay is solid, if not stunning. Unlike some OTHER World War II flight sims I’ve reviewed recently, this one has more or less faithful flight controls. It has two control styles, “arcade,” which is your typical too-easy roll/pitch combo, and “professional,” which is the good one that actually approaches what it’s like to fly a REAL aircraft. The game centers around your typical flight missions: Escort this, destroy that, dogfight with this. The mission design, however, is very good, and keeps these patterns from becoming repetitive or boring.
The enemy AI is challenging, especially if the game is ramped up to its maximum difficulty level, when individual aircraft actually become far more difficult than the vast majority of human opponents playing on Live. Your opponents know how to dogfight properly, and will respond much as a real pilot would when you fire on them or attempt to tail them. You have to learn to lead your target and also how to keep your six clean when in an engagement with multiple enemy aircraft. You’ll also learn how to evade enemy AA fire, make a clean torpedo run, and dive bomb.
The aircraft in this game are beautiful and somewhat faithful to the actual birds they represent. The P-38 Lightning, F6F Hellcat, and all the rest of the American workhorses are here. The Japanese are also aptly represented with the A6M Zero, Val and Kate bombers, and so forth. There are even a few exotic planes like the German Me262 and the Japanese Shinden. At first I got really excited when I beat the game and saw that “Japanese campaign and historical missions unlocked” and thought that there was a whole Japanese counter-historical campaign, but then I realized that all I had unlocked was the capability to fly through the AMERICAN missions again with the Japanese planes. Woo.
You can play in several ways: There is the primary campaign mode, which is a little short, but not too much so, the historical mission mode, which features a handful of missions based on REAL conflicts and engagements during the Pacific War, the Instant Action mode, which just spawns you and a bunch of AI opponents for you to shoot down, and then there’s multiplayer, which you can do over split screen, system link, or Live. Gameplay over Live is about average, and certainly contains a good bit of fun, but like almost all games on Live that aren’t Halo 2, it can be hard to find a good game unless you’re patient.
Graphics on this game are nice. Everything looks pretty (as it should, since the X-Box was released YEARS ago), except for the ground, units ON the ground, and the background landscape. These aren’t bad, and don’t really detract from the experience, but they look a cut below everything else in the game. The one graphical thing I really enjoyed about the game was the design of the menus. The main menu, the plane select menu, basically everything graphically in the game that’s not the actual gameplay, all of it was inspired by American propaganda during the 1940s. The design, fonts, and art all work beautifully to this effect and give the game a more authentic feel.
Sound is extremely good. The prop planes sound exactly like prop planes. I don’t know how they reproduced so accurately the rat-tat of machine guns and the wail of falling bombs that you hear in old WWII reels, but they did it. The audio you hear in this game really helps immerse you in the experience. The voice acting is also exceptional, although I was confused by the fact that some of the Japanese aces you fight during the game speak in English, while others speak in Japanese.
This game fails to excel (or really distinguish itself at all) in the replay department. Once you’ve gone through the campaign and the half dozen or so historical missions, that’s really all there is, though playing on a different difficulty setting gives you a different experience. Playing on Live, as with many other games, can be more frustrating at times than fun, and when you do get into a game set the way you like, it’s hardly the best online gaming experience I can imagine (nor do human opponents behave all that differently from the game’s AI).
Overall, Heroes of the Pacific might be worth a purchase if you’re aching for something to play right now and like flight sims, and it’s definitely worth a rental for most gamers. The best strategy would be to rent it once, play through the campaign, and be done with it forever. Or, if you’re a devoted flight addict, you can buy it when the price drops a little, and then bring it down off your shelf every half a year or so. Heroes of the Pacific is not at all a bad game, and certainly one that manages to deliver fun, albeit at a higher cost than it ought to.
