I've been waiting for something a bit more strategic to appear on the 360 – not necessarily a strategy game, but something where you have to do a bit more thinking than just running/driving/flying around killing everyone and destroying everything. Battlestations Midway certainly fills that brief – part real time strategy, part action game, in any given scenario you can be giving commands to battleships, submarines or aeroplanes on the battlefield, and then you can go and jump into any of the active units to carry out those orders.
The command of units is quite simple – you select them either on the map or in the individual unit's view, and then select their destination, be it a waypoint to move to, an enemy to attack or a friendly unit to defend. Launching air or sea craft is done by selecting the base or carrier unit and then picking the units to launch - although you will have to deal with the restrictions of only being able to launch a restricted number and range of units from each airfield or shipyard. If you fancy a bit of combat then the units all have simple enough control schemes, although the fighter planes can be quite tricky to fly and shoot at enemy fighters with.
The campaign has you following the career of a naval officer, beginning with commanding a torpedo boat at Pearl Harbour as the US Navy bravely repels the surprise Japanese attack (I know, I know). After only commanding single units initially giving the game a strong action feel, over the course of the campaign you progress onto commanding larger and more varied forces, bringing in the tactical angle. This actually highlights one of the main issues with the game – the fact that as soon as you have anything more than handful of units in play you're going to have to spend most of your time looking at the map and bases, commanding those units, and it's not a particularly visually inspiring view – just a 2D map, with simple overhead plane and boat shapes overlaid. The campaign isn't that long either – 11 missions, which range from 15 to 45 minutes long.
As well as the campaign there are a few challenges for boats, planes and submarines that you can do. There's not many of them, and they're not long, but they're certainly challenging, and there's achievement points for completing them. As you'd expect from a strategical game, playing against friends or just challenging random people online adds a lot of replay value to the package, but I get the feeling it's only going to be a long term interest to the most ardent of strategy fans.
The presentation is pretty average – the water looks lovely, but the land and the boats all lack detail, especially when it comes to battle damage and explosions. Aside from the rousing but short theme tune used in the menus on loop, the audio mostly avoids being repetitive, but it doesn't stand out as having anything special about it.
The thing about Battlestations Midway isn't that it's a bad game – there's nothing done badly - the commanding is easy enough to control and the units are all good fun to use. If you want to have a lurk around as a submarine or battleship then there's currently no other game on the platform to provide that experience. Ditto for dive bombing or dropping torpedoes from a plane, but if that's what you enjoy then you'll find quite quickly that the strategy of the game starts to get in the way of your enjoyment. Meanwhile, for the big tactical battles that strategy fans will like you're going to be stuck on a dull map screen, and miss out on a large portion of the game that you've paid for because you're not getting into any of the individual units.
To be fair to Eidos, I think that they've done a good job with a concept that is always going to struggle to become a great game. I applaud them for trying and even getting the product to market, but I wonder whether trying to reconcile the differences between a strategy game and an action game is even possible.
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