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. Although the game modes are numerous and enjoyable (the race to sink the other side’s carrier is the most fun) there simply isn’t enough people to make the game as fun as the biggies such as PGR2 and Halo 2, or indeed this Xbox version’s natural competition, the ageing Crimson Skies, which still has a faithful following 2 years on. You can add computer players to fill the lack of online buddies but it kind of defeats the point of playing online doesn’t it?
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 are 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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