When people think of arcadey flight games, the Ace Combat series on the consoles and even the AfterBurner arcade series spring to mind before anything available on the PC. That’s not to say there aren’t exceptions - Secret Weapons Over Normandy, released in 2003, offered a brief but thrilling slice of arcade WWII flight action, and Microsoft’s Crimson Skies, released in 2000. Alas, SWON and CS are notoriously difficult to run these days, and so Legendo, the team behind newly released Attack on Pearl Harbor clearly decided they had a gap to fill.
The game is very much in the SWON mould. It consists largely of a series of missions divided into four campaigns - two whilst playing as dashing US airman Douglas Knox and two playing as Zenji Yamada, a pilot for the Imperial Japanese Airforce. The flying model is gleefully simplistic - the game is playable entirely with the mouse, with quick flicks controlling pitch, yaw and roll of your aircraft. One mouse button controls the bird’s machineguns, (potential overheating of these being one of the few issues wannabe flyboys need concern themselves with aside from the destruction of the enemy) the other allowing use of either rockets, torpedoes and bombs, for fighters, torpedo planes and dive-bombers respectively. With the controls so heavily simplified, the focus can be squarely upon the action - and there’s a definite thrill to soaring around the maps, gunning down enemy planes and as a particular favourite, launching the air-to-ground rockets of fighters at enemy fighters head-on. They don’t, as a wise man once said, like it up ‘em. The graphical effects are quite pleasant, such as the way burning aircraft fall out of the sky and the explosions that rock ships under attack. The soundscapes are more than adequate as well, and so it’s only really the missions themselves that draw criticism.
Firstly, there are too few of them. Secondly, they become too predictable and lack variety - generally speaking, they usually consist of either bombing a certain target, torpedoing a certain target, or defending a certain target - always whilst under the attack of the enemy in conveniently-structured waves. It’s this sense of being predictable, as well as the rather bland environments, that infect most of the missions with a dry feeling. Only a few, such as those at Midway, ever really come close to the sheer excitement of SWON, the main game from which Legendo have taken their inspiration. It’s also unfortunate that the game takes a fairly conventional attitude to WWII, lacking the surrealist wit that helped make SWON such a treat.
That said, it remains unfortunately true that such games are fairly rare on the PC. And so perhaps particularly in such a drought, Attack on Pearl Harbor is a welcome offering, even if it does frequently fall short of the grandeur it could quite possibly have achieved.
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