Well yes, it is another WWII game, but Heroes of the Pacific isn’t a RTS or a FPS…
We as Brits may not be too familiar with the events of December 7th 1941: The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. It is a day that will live in infamy to Americans as the moment they entered WWII, but to younger gamers and much of the rest of the world as one of the most hammy and tedious war films since that one Elvis did… Anyway, moving back to the point, Pearl Harbour marks the start of your tour of duty in the US Airforce as young hotshot pilot Crowe. From here on in you’ll be thrown propeller-first into vicious dogfights and sea battles from Midway to Iwo Jima, and it’s as gritty as the M3 in December…
From the start the game has a very cool feel to it. All the menus and loading screens are a mix between wartime propaganda posters and old kids’ war comics that my dad passed down to me – very grainy with a lot of browns and beiges, and with classic slogans such as “Help our flying boys” and suchlike. It feels like a cross between Ace Combat, Medal of Honour and a copy of Commando.
The main meat of the game is in the story mode, which follows the major battles and skirmishes from the War in the Pacific, breaking up the missions with a few old newsreels and a storyline which is a lot less cheesy than I was expecting. The first mission at Pearl Harbour although intended to be for training felt more like cruel and unusual punishment. The mission wasn’t particularly hard, but trying to grasp the controls was harder than trying to teach my gran how to use a mobile phone, and only slightly less frustrating. The left analogue stick has pitch and roll mapped to it, and the right stick has power and yaw, as opposed to having buttons for power and the shoulder buttons for yaw. Anyone short of an actual pilot will have trouble trying to get used to the controls, especially when trying to fine-tune your attack line to stay behind an enemy plane, but once you’ve got it, you’ve got it and look bloody good doing it.
After spending my first twenty minutes cursing the developers and their kids I then started praising them for mapping such an ingenious control system and could enjoy the game a whole lot more. I have to say the dogfights in HoP are the best I've had in ANY flight combat sim I’ve played. In the Ace Combat series you would keep doing loop-the-loops until the enemy plane on your tail lost missile lock and then fire off a couple of missiles. HoP has you banking left and right, climbing up into the sky, only to switch into a corkscrew dive leaving you metres above the ocean. And that’s just the first Jap plane of literally hundreds. The AI is top-notch, doing pretty much everything they can to avoid you giving them a few extra exhaust ports, which makes a change from the rather tame AI usually found in air combat sims.
And it’s not just dogfighting you get to do in HoP; there’s a whole lot more to be done in the Pacific! As well as pasting Jap planes you also get to sink Destroyers and Carriers using both torpedo planes and dive-bombers. Both have to be done at certain speeds and angles to be done right, which the game shows you how to do and is very satisfying to see a Cruiser sinking or a flat-top engulfed in flames…
You also get the opportunity to bomb a few land targets too, with big bombers (complete with AI tail and main bubble gunners!). The land targets aren’t as fun as air, though, as they’re static and the gameplay seems to slow down from the frantic dogfighting and dive-bombing runs.
All of the planes from the Pacific conflict are here, including Japanese and some German planes too. They all have different stats, ranging from speed to armour and guns and all handle very differently to boot. By completing objectives in the missions (some of which are optional) you get points to upgrade the model of the plane (which also changes the paintwork to a cooler design), which is a good incentive to shoot down as many of those dirty Japs as you can!
As well as a few game modes that essentially play the same missions in different ways you have a split-screen 2 player mode and an online mode for up to 8 players, and here PS2 HoP has found yet another way to infuriate me beyond belief, but unfortunately practice won’t see me getting used to this one. I’m talking about Gamespy Arcade. Being a third party game, so without the benefit of nice Sony servers, in order to play HoP online you’ll need to register with Gamespy Arcade on your PC. Luckily I’d already done so for a PC game I had a while back, so it should be plain-sailing from here, right? Sadly, Gamespy apparently employ monkeys with ADHD to sort out their login process, as I proceeded to waste twenty-five minutes typing in my username, password and email address and different combinations thereof because the damn system wouldn’t recognise any of them. Turns out I had Crazypunk as my username, so just plain crazypunk or CRAZYPUNK wasn’t recognised (the type is naturally set to capitals…why?). Gamespy: I want my twenty-five minutes back.
After I spend a while long trying to get online I spend less than half that time actually playing. It seems most players must have had troubles with Gamespy too, as I could only find two players the whole time I was there and voice comms didn’t work for some reason (probably programmed by Gamespy engineers…). Scrolling through the game modes there is enough in the online mode to keep you happy but there simply don’t seem to be the people to play it with, so it’s not really worth the hassle of messing with the Gamespy login.
Overall Heroes of the Pacific is a good game. The controls take a lot of getting used to but if you can stick through that you’ll have a lot of fun ahead of you. The story mode is very well done and there’s enough planes and upgrades to unlock that you’ll be flying in the skies of the Pacific for a while to come…
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